With the winners and losers at the Oscars and BAFTAs dominating discussions on the Creative desk this week, the conversation quickly turned to the ever-controversial subject of book vs film. Which are the best film adaptations of novels or short stories? Which brilliant books were lost in translation when they ended up on the big screen?
Debate was starting to get out of hand, so we set about trying to settle the argument once and for all. We took all the films nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the past 20 years as our seed list. We then compared user reviews of each film from imdb.com with those for the book from which they were adapted, from goodreads.com.
In keeping with Oscar acceptance speech tradition, I’d like to thank all the people without whom this post would not have been possible: Margo & Henry for scraping data, Oliver for finding the story in the numbers, Mike for putting it all together in the infographic and PG Tips for the tea.