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In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

Twilight: Eclipse

Stephenie Meyer had a dream about a guy with sparkly skin. Most people would’ve forgotten about it and gone on with their day, but Meyer ended up writing a series of highly successful novels inspired by the visual of that dream. The first-time novelist followed Twilight with New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. The first two novels have been turned into a pair of movies, grossing over $1 billion worldwide. Not bad considering the production budgets for both films combined only totaled something like $100 million. Naturally, there are plans for three more movies based on the final two novels in the series. The latest (Eclipse) has just opened. Though there has been a different director for each film in the series (the director this time around is David Slade of hard Candy and 30 Days Of Night,), screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and much of the cast have remained consistent. Coming out just a half a year after the second film in the series, Eclipse is the mid-way point in what is planned to be a cinematic pentalogy based on the four-book series. How does the (thus far) hugely successful film series compare with the hugely successful book halfway in?

The Book

Stephanie Meyer’s third novel in the Twilight series is her third published novel overall, so it is likely she hasn’t had much distance from the characters from the characters in many thousand words of printed prose. With the third novel (published just three years ago), she seems to be as comfortable as ever with the characters. These are characters she writes about with a great deal of affection - old friends she’s gotten to know over a three or four-year period. By the time Meyer is sitting down to write Eclipse, the characters have helped to make her a huge success. It would be very difficult not to pick-up on this in Meyer’s prose, which focuses a great deal on interpersonal conversations and internal monologues.

The story so far: female protagonist high school student Bella Swan has moved cross-country to be with her father, who lives in the tiny, darkened town of Forks, Washington. In and amidst the general awkwardness of starting life in a new town and getting to know people in a new school, Bella ends-up falling in love with a vampire named Edward. It’s kind of a stormy relationship at first, slowly developing with the action and danger one would expect from a world of vampires and, as it turns out, werewolves. The second novel in the series expands on the natural animosity between werewolves and vampires with Bella caught in the middle of it all, inevitably going to Italy and promising a powerful European governing body to become a vampire.

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