Movie Novelizations: Why I Love Them
I was going through my massive book collection when I found an old tote bin. Aside from only a handful of shelves worth of fiction books (most of them in foreign languages so I could study with input), all of my books were textbooks or nonfiction. Some of them contained information so out of date, I could only speculate why I kept them on the shelf and not stashed away or donated to a thrift store.
I was beginning to wonder where my collection of fiction had gotten to when I popped open the tote and found a decent collection of them. As I browsed through them, trying to remember their details without skimming or leafing through their pages, I discovered I had a small collection of movie novelizations.
My gut reaction was to scoff. Novelizations of movies are usually rushed jobs, and while we’re used to novels being adapted into award-winning films, novelizations are hardly ever released to any sort of acclaim. There are plenty of people who complain bitterly that “the book was better” after seeing a film (myself included), but there is no one I know of who says the novelization was better then the film it was based on.
But then I started leafing through them and fondly remembered reading them. Most of them likely came from book fairs at school, long before the days of Harry Potter and the many brilliant young adult books that have been published since. No, when I was in elementary school in the 90s we had Goosebumps, and if you didn’t they were great books, you were pretty much out of luck.
I had the novelization of the movie Jumanji, which was based off a children’s book I also owned. There was also a novelization of the 1998 American Godzilla (or GINO, if you’re a nerd) film that I read to my younger brother, and, among the many Star Wars EU books, I also had some good old novelizations. Even now, out of curiosity, I’ve found myself reading the novelization of Ladyhawke, and it may have aged much better than the movie has!
Why Do Novelizations Exist?
I asked myself this as I stared at the pile of novelized movies before me. It’s not like novelizations are terrible. A lot of them, if my collection is anything to judge by, are very good!
According to author Alan Foster, “It’s always amusing to me, you take a book, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, throw away three quarters of it and win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, But if you take a screenplay and add three quarters of original material to it — which is a much, much more difficult piece of writing — well, that’s by definition ‘hackwork.’ And it’s much harder, having done both, to take a screenplay and make a book out of it than [to] take a terrific book and make a screenplay out of it.”
Part of me said that I could be asking, “Why make a film version of a story when it’s perfectly acceptable as a book?” But that’s not how we over analyze things on Medium, however, so I dug a little deeper.
Because Once Upon a Time, There Were No DVD or VCR Players
This is the obvious reason for novelizations, not just for film but for television as well. Nowadays, we can buy our favorite TV shows and movies on DVD, stream them online, or illegally download them off the Internet. In other words, there exist multiple copies throughout the world, and they are found in our homes and on our hard drives.
Back in the early days of movies and TV, however, this option didn’t exist. You had to wait for reruns of your favorite episodes or for theaters to re-release your favorite movies. This sucks for those of us who are Doctor Who fans because some studios (glance, glance) didn’t take as good of care of their properties as their fans would have and now we’re stuck wondering if the Marco Polo story will ever be found!
Novelizations were a way of immersing yourself in your favorite stories and characters all over again. Unlike a movie, you didn’t have to pay to enjoy the story every time you went to read it.
But wouldn’t the advent of home video have killed the novelization? Those were my original thoughts, but then I realized there are a few key incentives to keep writing and reading novelizations of films.
They Have Deleted Scenes
The novelization process usually stars early in a film’s production, therefore including scenes that don’t make the final cut. Some of them are fairly lackluster, but others shouldn’t have been cut from the film to begin with. Sometimes including these deleted scenes helps tie the story together in a way the final film lacked. Novelizations for The Last Jedi and Solo: A Star Wars Story are attempting to do this, although I personally feel that these movies need complete rewrites to do the franchise and characters any justice.
They Offer Different Perspectives
Did you know that the novelization for E.T is written from the extra terrestrial’s POV? It allows you to relive the story from a perspective that you probably weren’t really thinking about when you watched the movie.
As a Kid, You Can Read a Movie Your Parents Won’t Let You Watch!
When I was a kid, there were quite a few movies I wasn’t allowed to watch for reasons ranging from too scary to too mature. For some of these movies, though, I was able to read the book! I could still enjoy the story and be able to talk about it to a certain extent with my friends who had more lax parents than I did. I missed the visual gags, of course, but I could pick out my favorite characters just like they could!
So the next time your parents say something like, “You aren’t ready for Alien yet,” just grab the novelization and they probably won’t complain too much.
They’re Just Plain Fun
A lot of these books are just enjoyable to read. You may not consider the expanded material “canon”, but that’s fine. I don’t consider the way magic works in the Harry Potter films to be canon, either, but I still watch them just fine.
What Do You Think?
Do you read novelizations? Think they’re great? Sound off below!