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By: Ashwini Bandi

   Few announcements excite a reader more than hearing that their favorite book is finally being adapted for the screen. Almost instantly, you imagine the characters walking out of your mind and unfolding at last, in full color. You imagine the plot, which was so intricately and deliberately written, finally getting the visual treatment it deserves. Then the screen adaptation airs and a sinking feeling settles in. The ending is flipped. The motivations are rewritten. The slow-burn romance is rushed, and the tragedy is sanitized. The screenwriters have made monumental changes to the books you found comfort in. Then you look online and social media is exploding. The new screen adaptation fans, who have never even touched the books, are cheering. The ratings are exploding and the showrunner is being praised for their “fresh take”.

   Society needs to stop pretending this is a victory. When screenwriters fundamentally alter the plot of a book to satisfy the algorithms of the casual viewer, they strip the story of what made it special in the first place. There is a pervasive arrogance in modern writers’ rooms that leads to the assumption that a bestselling, beloved novel is merely a rough draft waiting for a Hollywood polish. 

   When an author spends years crafting a plot and even more time formulating each and every detail, every word serves a purpose. A character’s death usually serves as a thematic necessity, and a character’s failure often teaches a specific lesson. When a screenwriter takes that architecture and decides to tear it down to build another chain store, the story loses the individuality that made it worth visiting in the first place.

   Remember the collective groan of our generation when the Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief movie hit the theatres in 2010? A massive majority of high school students today spent their later elementary and middle school years glued to Rick Riordan’s pages, imagining Camp Half-Blood. The film adaptation, however, was a disaster. They aged the characters up by having 17 and 23 year olds playing 12 year olds, the primary villain was cut,

and the tone was significantly misunderstood, stripping the story of its coming of age significance, replacing it with the tone of a generic teen fantasy film. 

   Nowhere is the flattening of a character more apparent than in the cinematic adaptation of the romance between Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley. In the novels, Ginny Weasley is a dynamic force. She is a character defined by her sharp wit, her capabilities on the Quidditch field, and a fierce independence that allows her to mentally survive being possessed by the villain, Voldemort. Her bond with Harry is a slow-burn relationship that is grounded in their shared trauma and mutual understanding and humor. Ginny is one of the few people who can genuinely understand Harry’s burden, and yet the films managed to reduce her to a passive prize the hero suddenly wants. Consequently, when the romance is finally introduced on screen, it feels unearned and mechanical. The triumphant, spontaneous first kiss in the Gryffindor common room, a moment of earned joy following a Quidditch victory, was lost to the inexplicable, silent awkwardness of Ginny tying Harry’s shoelaces. 

   The strongest defense for these changes is always the numbers. “Look at the viewership!” studios cry. “The non-readers love the new ending!” This is the “Screen Fan” fallacy. Of course, a viewer who has never eaten a home cooked meal will enjoy a fast food burger. It is engineered to be palatable and easy to consume, but that doesn’t make it better than the

meal it replaced. 

   Possibly the most deceptive part of this trend is the marketing bait and switch. Studios buy the rights to the books because they want the guaranteed audience, baiting us through the doors of the theatre only to serve us a film that bears barely any resemblance to the one the readers were promised.

   If a showrunner feels the original plot is outdated, boring, or “doesn’t work for TV,” they have a

very simple option: Don’t adapt it! Leave it on the shelf for someone who respects it. When screenwriters prioritize the applause of the screen fans over the integrity of the author’s original plot, they rob the world of the specific vision of the author. The book was popular enough to be adapted for a reason. It’s time Hollywood remembered that.