Which Characters Are Missing From The Giver Books Movie?

I came out of the film feeling like it kept the headline characters but lost all the background gossip and small relationships I loved in 'The Giver'. Jonas, the Giver, Fiona, Asher and Gabriel are there, but a bunch of minor players who flesh out the community in the book are missing or barely present. The movie compresses the Council, trims the House of the Old scenes, and cuts several named elders who have short but meaningful moments in the novel.

Also important: the film doesn't touch characters from the companion novels. So Kira and other protagonists from 'Gathering Blue', and Matty from 'Messenger', aren't in the movie at all. If you were looking for every book name to pop up on screen, you won't find them — the adaptation chose to streamline and combine roles instead. Personally I missed the small, human moments those tiny characters provided; they made the society feel dense and weird in the best way.

I've got a short take: the movie keeps the main cast but drops a lot of the novel's small supporting people and skips anyone from the later books. Background elders and residents who have short chapters in 'The Giver' are cut or unnamed in the film, and characters from 'Gathering Blue', 'Messenger', and 'Son' don't appear at all. The result is a tighter story but with less of the community texture that made the book linger in my head.

I get why this question comes up so much — when I watched the 2014 film version of 'The Giver' I kept spotting whole swaths of the book's world that had been trimmed away. The movie keeps the core trio (Jonas, the Giver, Fiona) and a few big beats, but a lot of the smaller, texture-giving characters either vanish or are merged into larger roles. For example, many of the residents at the House of the Old who get individual moments in the book are backgrounded or completely unnamed on screen; their little stories that make the community feel lived-in don't get airtime. The Committee of Elders is also streamlined — instead of a full cast of Council members you mostly get the Chief Elder as a single focal point.

Beyond that, the film doesn't include characters from the later quartet books — so if you were hoping for Kira, Matty, or the fuller arcs tied to 'Gathering Blue', 'Messenger', or 'Son', those people simply aren't part of the movie. Some minor but memorable book names (the old woman who tells stories at the House of the Old, and a few released elders who get named vignettes in the novel) are either cut or reduced to single scenes. In short: the movie focuses on the main plot and emotional spine and drops a lot of the small-town citizens and sequel characters that give the novels their wider scope. If you love those small details, the book (and the rest of the quartet) is where they live.