What's more important: Being a good film, or a good adaptation?

[the nomad]

Why Can't it be both. I think that it can be both. It just depends on who is making the movie. Someone who didn't read the source material and is making it strictly from an outside view and just wants to make a film and not too worried about adaptation. Or is it someone who is a fan of the source material and wants to make a good adaptation as well as a good film

[Amadeus Arkham]

Being a good film. Here's two good examples. The movie 'Jaws' is a great movie but it's a terrible adaption of the novel. The Shining is a great classic but once again it's not at all a good adaption of Stephen King's original work. Patton Oswalt called the original Jaws book one of the worst books ever read and it's often been said the film is actually better than the original book (it's usually the other way around). Try imagining Spielberg had remained faithful to the book. Would Jaws really be heralded as one of the best movies ever made? Or if Kubrick had remained faithful to the Shining novel instead putting his own cinematic stamp on it would it really be beloved as the horror classic that it is?

Faithfulness can be good to a some degree but there are such things as being too faithful(one of the primary criticisms of Snyder's Watchmen was that it was slavishly faithful to the source material). Deviations are necessary in order to make the book work for the medium it's being adapted to. You always have to take some creative license. It's called adaption for a reason.

[Flyattractor]

Having read the old Jaws novel, this is very much true.

[Malvolio]

There are certain things that work better in a novel than in a film, and certain things that work better in a film than in a novel. For instance, it can take several pages in a novel to describe what someone's bedroom looks like, while that can be conveyed in a few seconds in a film. On the other hand, inner monologues work all the time in novels, but often sound stilted as a voice-over in a film. Just take a look at Bladerunner as it was released, and then the director's cut without Harrison Ford's voice-over.

[numberthirty]

Being a good film. Here's two good examples. The movie 'Jaws' is a great movie but it's a terrible adaption of the novel. The Shining is a great classic but once again it's not at all a good adaption of Stephen King's original work. Patton Oswalt called the original Jaws book one of the worst books ever read and it's often been said the film is actually better than the original book (it's usually the other way around). Try imagining Spielberg had remained faithful to the book. Would Jaws really be heralded as one of the best movies ever made? Or if Kubrick had remained faithful to the Shining novel instead putting his own cinematic stamp on it would it really be beloved as the horror classic that it is?

The fact that The Thing set out to be a more faithful adaption of Who Goes There? is the very thing that makes it the horror classic that The Thing From Another World never was.

[Madam-Shogun-Assassin]

The fact that The Thing set out to be a more faithful adaption of Who Goes There? is the very thing that makes it the horror classic that The Thing From Another World never was.

That's a really good point...