25 modern book-to-screen adaptations that didn’t let us down

Adapting popular books for the big or small screen doesn’t always go well, but thankfully, there are some adaptations that do their books justice.

Adapting books for the screen — whether it’s the big one or the small one — can be a daunting task. After all, if a book or series is popular enough to warrant an on-screen adaptation, it likely already has a dedicated fanbase. And there’s nothing book-lovers dread more than a book-to-film adaptation that doesn’t do the original story justice.

Sadly, adaptations that alter the original content — and not for the better — are entirely too common. During the process of recreating the story, many filmmakers lose sight of the author’s message in favor of highlighting their own. And while making major changes sometimes works, it usually just results in a lot of disappointed fans.

Luckily, things seem to be improving on the book-to-screen adaptations front, though. There are plenty of recent adaptations that don’t suffer from these problems, successfully keeping the author’s message and story intact. And in recent years, there are even a few adaptations that have received even better feedback than the books they were based off of — something that feels almost blasphemous for book lovers to admit.

These are 25 adaptations that were as good — if not better — than their book counterparts.