‘The Godfather’ and 7 Other Film Adaptations Critics Rate Higher Than the Novel

Most of us grew up hearing that the book is always better. It’s a comfortable rule, and it holds up often enough that people rarely question it.

Still, a handful of adaptations have flipped the script. In these cases the film is the version that lands on greatest-movies lists, while the source novel is remembered mostly as the raw material. Here are eight examples where critical opinion favors the screen.

The Godfather

Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel was a huge bestseller, but it was also pulpy, sprawling, and happy to linger on subplots. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film kept the family drama and trimmed much of the lurid side material.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Puzo shared the adapted screenplay Oscar with Coppola. It regularly appears near the top of critics’ all time lists, a standing the novel has never approached.

Jaws

Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel was a runaway hit, yet it spent plenty of pages on a affair subplot involving the police chief’s wife and the oceanographer. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film dropped most of that and focused on the hunt for the shark.

Critics have long praised the film’s suspense and its restraint, especially the way it keeps the shark hidden for much of the running time. It’s widely credited with shaping the modern summer blockbuster, which is not a legacy the novel can claim.

Psycho

Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel is a tight, effective thriller, and it deserves credit for the premise. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film took that premise and turned it into a lesson in pacing and misdirection.

The shower scene and the shift in point of view are the parts people remember. Film scholars routinely rank the movie among the most influential thrillers ever made, while Bloch’s book is mostly read by genre fans today.

Forrest Gump

Winston Groom’s 1986 novel is satirical and quite a bit rougher than its reputation suggests. In the book, Forrest is a more cynical and chaotic figure, and the tone is sharper.

The 1994 film softened him into a gentle everyman and leaned into sentiment. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Eric Roth’s adapted screenplay also took an Oscar. Critics have debated its politics since, but few would argue that the novel has had comparable reach.

Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is admired for its ideas about empathy and what counts as human. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film changed a great deal, including the emphasis on mood and visual design.

The movie had a modest start with audiences, then gathered a strong critical reputation over the following decades. This one is more debatable than the others, since the novel has its devoted defenders. Even so, the film is the version most often cited as a landmark of science fiction cinema.

Die Hard

The 1988 film was based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel, Nothing Lasts Forever. The book is a grimmer story with a very different hero, an older retired detective rather than the wisecracking John McClane.

Critics now treat the film as a model of the modern action movie, praising its geography, pacing, and sense of character. Few readers come to the novel without first knowing the movie, and that says a lot about which one carries the reputation.

Children of Men

P. D. James published her dystopian novel in 1992, and it’s a quiet, philosophical work about a world without births. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film kept the premise but rebuilt the story as a tense, immediate chase through a collapsing Britain.

Reviewers singled out its long continuous takes and its sense of realism. Over the years it has appeared on many lists of the best films of its decade, usually ahead of the book in public conversation.

The Devil Wears Prada

Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel was a commercial success, drawn from her time working at a fashion magazine. The 2006 film, directed by David Frankel, gave the story sharper comic timing and a more layered boss character.

Meryl Streep’s performance as Miranda Priestly earned an Oscar nomination and became the film’s calling card. Critics generally found the movie more polished and more memorable than the book that inspired it.

Where the Screen Pulled Ahead

In each case above, the filmmakers cut, reshaped, or softened the source material to fit a different medium. Those choices are what critics tend to reward.

The novels remain worth reading, and several are fine books in their own right. The films simply became the versions that audiences and critics return to most.