Should books be adapted into movies?

The criteria by which movies and books are judged are different

Question: Should books be adapted into movies?
Position‹3 of 3: Books and movies are incomparable
Argument: The criteria by which movies and books are judged are different

What makes a movie good is not dependent on the screenplay alone.

The argument

A film and the book it comes from are assessed against different standards, and those standards do not translate into one another. A movie's quality is judged by how cinematography, acting, props, costuming and other film-specific elements are handled — craft decisions that have no counterpart on the page. None of them can be done well or badly in a novel, because none of them exist there. The screenplay looks like the place where the two forms meet, since it carries the story and the characters across. But a script is not a book manuscript. Its format is different and its attention is concentrated on dialogue, because everything else will be supplied by performers, designers and a camera. A book works the other way round: alongside the dialogue it narrates details about the characters and the setting, and much of what a reader values sits in that description — the prose itself, the interior life it opens up, the pacing of what is revealed. What the screenplay keeps is the part of the book that most readily converts; what it leaves behind is often the part that made the book good. The practical consequence is familiar. A book can be good but have a terrible movie made out of it, and the reverse happens just as often, because success in one medium depends on skills and materials the other never had to supply. That makes each a poor instrument for measuring the other. Hence the conclusion: a book should not be judged from whether the movie adaptation was good or not, and a movie adaptation cannot act as an indicator for how good the book is either. The two are not better and worse versions of one work but separate works answering to separate criteria, and comparing them across that gap is a category error.

Premises

[P1]Movies are judged by film-specific elements like cinematography, acting, props, and costuming, while books are judged by descriptive narration of characters and setting. [P2] A screenplay differs in format from a book manuscript, focusing on dialogue rather than the descriptive prose that defines a book. [P3] Because the evaluative criteria differ, a good book can yield a bad movie and vice versa, so neither can serve as an indicator of the other's quality. [C] Therefore, books and movies are incomparable and should not be judged against each other.

Counter-arguments

Different technical criteria do not make books and films incomparable. Both are storytelling forms judged on shared dimensions — narrative structure, character, theme, pacing and emotional impact — which is exactly why audiences and critics compare an adaptation to its source in the first place. That a strong book can produce a weak film shows only that adaptation quality varies, not that the two works occupy separate, non-overlapping scales. The medium-specific tools differ, but the story being told is common ground on which comparison is both possible and routine.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Books and films share evaluative criteria at the level of story, character and theme, so differing technical criteria do not render them incomparable.