(November 2, 2007) — “Who would want to watch a movie about some ancient English story?” asked senior Bella Arutunyan when the topic of the soon to be released movie Beowulf came up. Arutunyan, a student in Melanie Martin’s AP English Literature class, recently finished reading the poem “Beowulf” for class and believes that since she did not find the story interesting, the movie may be boring as well. Although students like Arutunyan are reluctant about the premiere of the film, students like senior Haik Manukian enjoyed reading “Beowulf.” He said he is “definitely going to watch the movie.” The 8 th century poem about an ancient warrior will soon be released as a movie on Nov. 16. In recent years, many movies have adopted their ideas from the lives of celebrities, storylines of television shows and different genres of music. However, one of the greatest influences on movies has been books. Many required books in school have had a movie made out of them and in many cases, teachers choose to show them to their students after reading the book. In recent decades young adults prefer watching movies to reading books, students tend to think that the books are much better than the movies. “Last year in AP English, we read The Death of a Salesman and then we watched the movie,” senior Lilit Javadian said. “But I really liked the book over the movie.” It may seem as though using books to make movies has become an easy route for Hollywood. It can be seen as a fallback that screenwriters use when no new ideas are available to use for their movies, a route that many moviegoers take rather than reading a book. Manukian thinks it is alright to make a movie out of a book, and though it may be different from the author’s original ideas, there is reasoning behind that. In the case of “Beowulf,” he said, you “can’t shove a whole translation of the book into two hours, and moviemakers are obviously going to make it with a bit of a Hollywood twist to appeal to people.”