These 7 Book-to-Screen Adaptations Were Actually Better Than the Book — and the Ones Viewers Say Bombed
A new data study compares Goodreads and IMDb scores to see which adaptations lived up to the hype—and which ones readers say fell flat.
If you’ve ever finished a buzzy adaptation and thought the book was better, you’re very much not alone. The last year has been packed with page-to-screen projects, from Emerald Fennell’s upcoming take on Wuthering Heights to splashy thrillers and prestige limited series. Some have become obsession-level TV; others barely made a blip.
To see how viewers really feel, McLuck looked at recent book-to-screen releases and compared each title’s Goodreads rating with its on-screen IMDb score. They converted Goodreads’ 5-star scale to 10, then calculated the percentage difference between the book and its adaptation. The smaller the gap, the closer the adaptation came to matching the book, and in a few rare cases, the show or movie actually beat it.
Here’s how the numbers shake out.
The adaptations that actually beat the book
Out of all the titles McLuck analyzed, only seven adaptations scored higher than their source material. That’s it—seven.
‘Normal People’ still reigns as the gold standard
The top over-performer isn’t even new, which tells you how strong it is: Normal People. The BBC Three series, which later landed on Hulu in the U.S., follows Marianne and Connell’s messy, intimate relationship from a small town in Ireland to their college years in Dublin. It holds an 8.4 rating on IMDb, while Sally Rooney’s novel sits at 3.81/5 on Goodreads (roughly 7.6/10), meaning the show outperforms the book by about 9.3%.
For anyone who watched it during lockdown and never emotionally recovered, that probably tracks.
‘Heated Rivalry’ is the breakout winner of the last year
The best-performing recent adaptation is queer hockey romance Heated Rivalry, based on Rachel Reid’s novel of the same name. The series about rival NHL-style stars Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—whose secret relationship plays out over years of competition—became a surprise global hit after premiering on Crave and later streaming on HBO Max.
The book holds a strong 4.31/5 on Goodreads, but the show’s 8.9/10 IMDb score edges it out by about 3.1%, making it the top recent adaptation in McLuck’s ranking.
‘Wicked,’ ‘One Day’ and the prestige crowd
A few other big-name titles also managed to pull ahead of their books: Wicked (Part One of the film franchise), One Day, George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood (via HBO’s prequel series House of the Dragon), British spy thriller Slow Horses and horror miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher all scored slightly better on screen than on the page.
The margins are small—usually a couple of percentage points—but enough to suggest that in these cases, casting, pacing, and visual world-building helped the stories land with a broader audience.
Where the books still win by a mile
Most adaptations didn’t manage that trick. According to McLuck’s data, the majority of titles saw the on-screen version lag behind the book once you line up the two rating scales.
Some of the biggest gaps include:
- Thrillers and domestic suspense. Book-club favorite The Housemaid by Freida McFadden scored 4.27/5 on Goodreads, but its adaptation trails with a 6.9/10, a gap of nearly 24%. The Woman in Cabin 10 and My Oxford Year also slipped significantly when they moved to screen.
- Emotional crowd-pleasers. Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You rates 4.1/5 with readers, yet the adaptation sits at 6/10, a difference of more than 36%.
- The harshest drop-offs. At the very bottom of the list are The Twisted Ones and The Man in My Basement. Both books perform reasonably well with readers, but their adaptations saw IMDb scores that were 57–60% lower than the adjusted Goodreads ratings.
In other words, even when a book isn’t a universal five-star read, the adaptation can still underwhelm fans who were hoping to see a favorite story elevated on screen.
Why so many book adaptations miss the mark
Ratings aren’t everything, but they do highlight a pattern: it’s a lot easier to disappoint readers than it is to convert skeptics.
Dense inner monologue, nonlinear timelines, and niche genre elements can be brutal to translate visually without either dumbing the story down or losing what made it special in the first place. That shows up in the numbers for titles like The Housemaid and Regretting You, where fans were clearly invested in the emotional beats of the book and less sold on the adaptation’s execution.
On the flip side, series such as Heated Rivalry, Slow Horses, and The Fall of the House of Usher benefited from longer runtimes and strong creative teams. They had room to let the characters breathe, sharpen plotlines that felt meandering on the page, and lean into casting choices that brought in new viewers who hadn’t read a single chapter.
And if you’re already counting down to new adaptations, there’s plenty more to dig into. You can get a closer look at the real-life price tags behind the dramatic jewelry worn in the upcoming Wuthering Heights movie, and, if you’re in the mood for a binge, this article rounds up the series viewers literally lost sleep over.
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