REAL LIFE NEWS: STATISTICS GRADUATE PROVES THAT BOOK TRILOGIES ARE BETTER THAN FILM TRILOGIES
by Hazed
Fantasy and science fiction books often come in threes, with many prolific authors churning out trilogies. Readers like them, publishers like them, bookshops like them – they are successful.
Now a new study by statistics graduate has confirmed that book trilogies get better from book one through to book three – in contrast to film trilogies, which get worse as each successive film is released.
Kaylin Walker analysed the reviews of a range of book trilogies on Goodreads, and film trilogies on IMDb. She found that “Movie trilogies get worse, losing favour with each film, while book trilogies secure higher ratings for book two and maintain them for book three.”
She speculated on the reason: “It could be that book content is better. Authors have the opportunity to lay out the full arc from the start, resulting in a more cohesive story, while movie trilogies are often constructed quickly following box-office success, resulting in third-act disasters like The Matrix Revolutions or slapdash profit grabs such as Legally Blondes.”
Fantasy author Joe Abercrombie had another explanation: that readers who make it to the end of a trilogy of books are likely to be fans. “The first book in a series will always get by far the most reviews. People who really don’t like the style of the author may try that first book, hate it, give it a low rating, and never move on to the others. So there’s a kind of natural selection at work where the further into a series you get, the more you only have readers that like the basic approach,” he says.
Walker also points to the time commitment needed. “Why would a reader who didn’t like book one read and rate book two?” she writes. “The pool of users who rate the second and third books are likely the readers who rated the first book positively, resulting in higher ratings for the subsequent books. This effect may be present in movie ratings, but the time commitment is less of a barrier: 90 minutes to watch Men in Black II versus 20 hours to read A Court of Mist and Fury.”
