Never judge a book by its film adaptation.
What type of fan are you: do you prefer books to movies or the other way around?
Hopefully, the following reasons will encourage you to read more books.
1. Picture the protagonists the way you like it. While reading a book you see things as if a film is playing in your head. You can freely imagine all the characters. It’s like you are he director of an imaginary film.
2. Books develop our thinking. It is scientifically proven that more reading makes people easily digest information as they improve their analytical and creative thinking skills.
3. Books usually offer more detail to the story and the characters. Movies are like shortened versions of books. Directors have to make some decisions so to make a 400-500-page book fit into 1.30-hour movie. To do that they usually cut whole chapters from the book and a lot of things mentioned in the book go missing.
4. The movie gives away too much and spoils the pleasure of reading the book. Obviously, if you read the book you will know what happens in the movie but still there is the thrill to see it for yourself and compare the movie with the one you have created in your head while reading the book.
5. Having read the book prevents you from hearing spoilers about the movie. Spoilers are everywhere: not only are your friends who can’t keep their mouths shut but also when you are on Facebook or YouTube you can't help seeing images, videos and articles shared around, all of them containing spoilers about the movie or TV show. If you have already read the book, you can sign with a relief saying to yourself “It doesn't matter. I know how it ends".
6. A lot of movie adaptations are too altered and stand far from the books. This is not a bad thing, actually. In this case, it doesn't matter whether you read the book or watch the movie first. Booklovers would prefer reading the book and cinemagoers would watch the movie. The best thing is that there is no spoiler threat since there is a world difference between the two.
7. Most movies tend to abandon the book's message. That is because film producers aim for tapping the movie into a large audience so to generate large profits. Consequently, they lose the book fans who have already enjoyed the book and want to feed their curiosity by seeing the movie adaptation.
8. Some moviemakers try to enlarge the story on a major scale. Sometimes by magnifying the plot directors run the hazard to leave the audience utterly disappointed.
9. The movie gets negative reviews. This gives a strong reason why you should read the book first.
10. Reading the book first helps you handle the plot. Sometimes the movie is so bad that people have to read the book to understand the ending or the whole sense of the movie in which case they get no pleasure from either the book or the movie.
11. Some things get lost in translation. When it comes to book to movie translation there are always details that get missing. Movies tend to focus on the plot twists ignoring big parts of the story. For this reason, watching the movie will inevitably spoil everything.
There are many movies that got really messed up because the events in the book, portrayed through the main character’s perspective, didn’t get even close to meeting the viewers’ expectations. Luckily, that's not what happened with “The Hunger Games”. However, Suzanne Collins trilogy makes a good example of why you should read the books first and then watch the movies because there are a few moments in the movies that people who haven't read the books would barely understand.
