The “Young Adult” section at Barnes & Noble features many books that have since been adapted into films. Credit: Grayson Newbourn | Managing Editor Arts & Life
From “The Hunger Games” to “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” popular stories that once lived quietly on the page are now commanding massive amounts of attention on-screen and online.
Fan communities now have the ability to make or break a movie before it even hits theaters. Shaped by passionate readers and social media algorithms, book-to-film adaptations have become much more than entertainment.
With upcoming releases like “People We Meet on Vacation,” “The Housemaid” and “Wuthering Heights,” film studios are doubling down on adapting popular novels. Their fanbases, along with TikTok’s “BookTok” community — where readers post reviews and recommendations that go viral — are helping to determine which titles make the cut.
“We live in an age of transmedia storytelling and convergence culture,” Amrutha Kunapulli, assistant professor of theatre, film and media arts, said. “The same text will exist as a movie, book, TV show, comic book, video game, TikTok series, YouTube video and a podcast. What is most central is the content itself.”
Kunapulli said streaming platforms and online fandoms have reshaped how studios approach adaptations.
“If you go to a publishing house and pitch a book, one of the things they will decide is whether or not someone will make a movie out of it and how marketable it is for the BookTok audience,” Kunapulli said.
Seeing a beloved book turn into a movie can be exciting, but also stressful for fans. Scott Spears, a lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Arts, said finding the right balance between honoring the source material and making a film that stands on its own is key.
“The creators have to have a reverence for the original,” Spears said. “If they’re smart, they are going to pay service to the fans, not slavishly, but remembering people bought those books for a reason; they are going to see the movie for a reason.”
Kunapulli said fans today play an even more active role in shaping adaptations, thanks to the accessibility of social media.
“Social media has reduced the distance between producers and consumers to a point where there’s immediate communication between the two,” Kunapulli said. “People are constantly changing things based on what the fans want. You are making it for them, so if they don’t watch it, you aren’t going to make money.”
That level of access can be both a gift and a challenge, Spears said.
“Casting is a kind of alchemy,” Spears said. “I’ve seen a couple shows where the romantic leads have no chemistry and it killed the show.”
The influence of adaptations extends beyond streaming screens and social media. At Prologue Bookshop in the Short North, store marketing and events manager Tara Ryan-Gallagher said she’s seen firsthand how adaptations spark a wave of new readers.
“It definitely encourages people to read more … [it] encourages people to branch outside their genre,” Ryan-Gallagher said. “Even if someone isn’t a big reader, if they’ve seen the movie or show, they’re more likely to pick up the book.”
While Ryan-Gallagher said she personally loves to hear about upcoming adaptations, not everyone is as welcoming.
“I get really excited for them,” Ryan-Gallagher said. “But a lot of people get nervous because they feel strongly after they spent so much time with this [book] and it was perfect in the media it was in. They get protective.”
Ryan-Gallagher said this mix of excitement and anxiety often comes from a place of passion, though.
“Some people in the literary scene say, ‘Translation can be an act of betrayal,’ and I think that adapting is a form of translating,” Ryan-Gallagher said.
Ryan-Gallagher said some genres naturally translate better than others.
“Literary fiction a lot of the time translates well to film because at the heart of literary fiction, it’s so human,” Ryan-Gallagher said. “Fantasy and sci-fi could be that when done right, but they’re genres that are generally disserviced by adaptations — whether it be budget restrictions or other limits. When it’s done well it has a high payoff, but it’s tricky.”
At Prologue, Ryan-Gallagher said the staff uploads social media posts and curates displays around upcoming adaptations to meet the demand.
“If we know something’s being adapted, maybe it’s a book we wouldn’t normally carry, now we will or we’ll order a larger quantity,” Ryan-Gallagher said.
Spears said the same excitement that drives readers to buy the book is what drives studios to bet big on the story’s potential in theaters.
“These books have a built-in audience,” Spears said. “[Like] Stephen King — there’s a reason seemingly half of his books have been turned into movies. He has a giant audience.”
As Hollywood continues turning bestsellers into blockbusters, Spears said the trend isn’t going anywhere, with studios playing it safe and making films they know will draw an audience.
“They will continue to adapt popular intellectual property into movies, whether its successful novels, comic books, graphic novels, adaptations of true crime,” Spears said. “You just can’t go wrong.”
