We all know the drill, a great book comes out, and the big guys in Hollywood decide to make a movie about it. Sometimes, it goes really well.

Since the beginning of modern film, filmmakers and screenwriters have been taking popular novels and turning them into movies.

Sometimes, this is a great success, and the novel is portrayed beautifully on the silver screen.

Other times, which seems to be more prevalent nowadays, movies seem to stray far from their tangible counterparts. These loosely-based movies are sometimes entirely different stories within themselves.

For some reason, these movies that don’t follow the correct story line are often more popular than their novels. This phenomenon occurs when people haven’t read the book first, or when they are unaware that there even is a book with the same title.

Movies that are done well and follow their book exactly seem to be few and far between nowadays. But some examples of good transitions include To Kill a Mockingbird, Harry Potter movies, Lord of the Rings movies, Fight Club, The Secret Life of Bees, The Reader, V For Vendetta, 300, Watchmen, I, Robot, Pride and Prejudice, and many others.

Some interpretations of novels become just downright awful when they hit the big screen. Even though people that have not read the books enjoy these, the people that do read the books can easily get infuriated (meaning, me).

The most mind-boggling of these situations includes when the author of the original novel writes the screen play for the movie, or supervises the actual filming of their movie.

Examples of these terrible movies (which are sometimes entertaining if one is blissfully ignorant of the novel, which sometimes even I can be) include practically any Stephen King movie (despite the books’ literary merit and moving plots), October Sky, The Golden Compass, I Am Legend, Hoot and many others.

The movies listed above are actually good films, they just don’t follow the plot, or sometimes the mood of the novel very well.

As long as books continue to be published, they will unavoidably be turned into movies that can either be celebrated by the actors, directors, producers, and writers, or they can be horribly destroyed forever, much to the dismay of the loyal reader.