10 Films BETTER Than The Book They Were Based On

This might be a controversial inclusion, but the early ‘00s film trilogy did an exemplary job of trimming away the fat from Tolkien’s fantasy epic.

The problem with the novels lies in their pacing; Tolkien fills whole pages with descriptions of feasts and elvish songs recorded in their entirety. This quickly get boring, prompting the reader to leaf through the book to check how long is left in the current chapter; the highs are very high but the lows are equal.

The movie wisely does away with many of these scenes, or at least makes them more compact, quickly flitting over them to the next - more interesting - part of the adventure.

Some inspired casting helps too: Frodo (Elijah Wood), Sam (Sean Astin), Gandalf (Ian Mckellan), Saruman (Christopher Lee) are all magnificent. The other characters are largely paper-thin; a problem shared by both the book and film.

As if to prove how well they did when adapting The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy took the opposite tact; adding in new characters and plot threads to make that relatively svelte novel extend to three terrible movies.