20 Things You Didn't Know About The Prestige

17. The Movie Made One Massive Change From The Original Novel

The Prestige novel Christopher Priest
Tor Books

It's borderline impossible for a director to take a novel and translate it word-for-word onto the screen. Movies just have to be constructed differently to books, and the same was true when Nolan was tasked with adapting The Prestige.

The movie makes several changes to the source material (like altering Angier's first name from Rupert to Robert), but one of the biggest tweaks it made was the decision to omit a modern-day subplot involving the descendants of Angier and Borden.

In the book, Angier and Borden's great-grandchildren are involved in the story, with parts of their lives being interspersed with the events of the past. However, Nolan chopped out these present-day segments entirely, possibly for the purpose of streamlining the novel to fit within a two-hour runtime.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!