Why Do Directors Turn Good Books Into Shitty Movies?

This seems like such a 'first world problem' to some people but for us dedicated readers of the books, it's really depressing to see such a phenomenon happen. There have been quite a few directors who took amazing works of art and turned them into such average or even bad films and the readers were MAD! 

One of those films was, personally one of my favorite fantasy-romance books, Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. If I weren't a reader of the books I would've probably thought it was a pretty decent movie. But there were a lot of changes in the making of the film that were exceptionally noticeable. 

Those changes along with the disappointment of the readers resulted in the movie gaining about $90.5 million worldwide against their $60 million production budget, making them unable to make a sequel and cancelling the 2nd movie.

(Clary and Jace. Poster imported from Google Images)

The main change that bothered me was the appearance of the most important character, Clary.  In the books, Clary is supposed to be a short teenager with curly red hair and freckles but -as you see from the poster above- the actress (Lilly Collins) that they chose to represent the heroine had almost none of these qualifications. She's a brunette with wavy hair, no freckles, her eyes are brown-hazel and she looks a lot over her character's age.

Now, don't get me wrong, Lilly is a beautiful woman and a very talented actress in my opinion. I just believe that she wasn't fitting for the cast of this movie! I am in no means trying to hate on her or bash her acting skills.

(Mortal Instruments - Poster imported from Google Images)

The second important detail that they definitely ruined in the making of the movie was the series of events and when each of them occurred. I do realize that most movies are only 2 and a half to 3 hours long max, but you can't fit in the contents of 3 books which have 500+ pages each in a single film!

Well, actually, they tried fitting 2/3 books in that film. But they mixed the events of each book together which only made things worse.

That resulted in the plot feeling way sorter than it actually is and most of the viewers got really confused. To be honest, I got slightly confused too, but since I had read the books beforehand I pretty much knew what was going on. 

In conclusion, one would imagine that when a director creates a movie adaptation of a really famous book (like Cassandra Clare's "City of Bones"), they take care of important details such as the accurate representation of a character's appearance and the correct series of events. But I guess that isn't the case with some films. 

Hopefully, the 'Mortal Instruments' TV show (the first season is available to watch on IMDB) is better than the film. I haven't watched it yet but be sure that I'll give you an update when I do!

xoxo,

Lexi

p.s. I do not own these 2 pictures. I only found them on google image search and decided to use them for illustration purposes. I am by no means claiming the pictures as mine. All rights go to the owners of the images.