Fandom In Context: The Enduring Allure Of Movie Novelizations

There's something about seeing a movie poster on a book cover. Sandwiched between that shrunken piece of painted movie marketing and the back cover's obligatory film credits and slapdash plot summary are 200-some-odd inviting pages. What does Gremlin 2 look like on the printed page? How do you turn xXx: The Return of Xander Cage in prose? You can answer these questions by reading novelizations, book adaptations of blockbuster movies. And they can be just as entertaining as the source material.

Novelizations are not a new phenomenon. While most readers ignored these movie tie-ins, novelizations quietly built a large following, eventually becoming a popular and profitable form of entertainment. Online, photos of collections, group writing projects and fan discussion outweigh the form's commonly perceived shortcomings.

Novelizations didn't start in the 1980s (despite what every garage sale would have you believe). The earliest versions date back to the silent film era, with written adaptations of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires and the infamous lost Lon Cheney film London After Midnight hitting shelves in the 1910s and 20s. A novelized King Kong soon followed. By the late-70s, novelizations were big business as book versions of Star Wars and Alien sold millions.

ROTS novelization is a pathway to many quotes, some consider to be uncanon. from r/PrequelMemes

Fan culture came into its own in the 1980s. The cultural domination by science fiction, fantasy and action franchises, like those devised by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, inspired a wave of merchandise that included books. So the decade saw the publication of genre classics, like Back to the Future, Batman and E.T. in novel form.

Today, novelizations are still big business. In 2014, the novelization of the American Godzilla reboot hit the New York Times bestseller list, a rare event. Not publishing a novelization, it turns out, is leaving money on the table. The New York Times wrote in 2015, "Writers and publishers of these books usually estimate that 1 or 2 percent of the total audience will buy the book, so a show that draws two million viewers might sell 20,000 paperback copies." The people who buy these books are fans, and like all other fan cultures, they have their own means of expression and appreciation. As the novelization grew in popularity, they became a pop culture curio beloved by collectors and obsessives who began sharing their libraries and opinions online.

"The first novelization I remember buying myself was Batman '89 by Craig Shaw Gardner," Paxton Holley, the host of the "I Read Movies" podcast writes in an email conversation. Holley's teenage interest continued into his adult life. "I was a freshman in high school and the Batman media blitz was in full swing. I was so hyped up for the movie that when I found the book, I bought it immediately and started reading it. That year, I found the novelization of Back to the Future: Part II in Waldenbooks. Things sort of snowballed from there."

For any of you who are fans of the movie, I highly suggest reading Peter David’s novelization of Spider-Man 2. The book provides a deeper insight into how each character feels, and it compliments the movie upon rewatch. Ever wonder how Peter felt about being called an empty seat? pic.twitter.com/nKUGHDhh3m

— Spider-Man’s Comic Compendium (@DDKeyD) January 9, 2021

In a pre-internet world, reading the movie was one of the few ways fans could get some more information, more story and more time with the characters they loved, especially after the film left theaters. "What appealed to me about novelizations was just riveting movies that I loved," Holley wrote. "I was already a reader in high school, so reading a book that described a movie that I just saw and enjoyed was fun, especially if it added new dialogue or extra scenes. That's what keeps them appealing today. A new, fresh look at movies I've seen hundreds of times."

The "I Read Movies" podcast is all about appreciating the novelization, whether the book is good or bad. The first-anniversary show focuses on late-writer George Gipe's infamous version of Back to the Future. The book has a cult following, thanks to its intense differences from the source material. Ryan North, the creator of the meme-classic Dinosaur Comics, began publishing page-by-page annotations and analysis of these changes on Tumblr. Here's the first entry on BtotheF:

If you were writing the first words of a novel version of Back to the Future, how would you do it? Maybe you’d introduce the concept of time being important, like the film did with all them crazy clocks. Maybe instead you’d introduce Marty and Doc, show who they are and what their relationship is. Well, anyway, you’re totally wrong!
The correct answer is to KILL EVERYBODY.

"Here, in the living room of a peaceful house in the suburbs, a typical family sits quietly. Dad reads the evening paper, unaware that disaster is about to strike. Mom cleans the dinner dishes, oblivious to the fact that in a few seconds their world will be reduced to a whirlwind of splinters and atomized debris. The children are in their rooms, doing their homework, little knowing that only a few moments of life are left to them, that they will never have to worry about homework again. The mightiest force ever created by man is about to be unleashed on them and there is nothing on earth they can do about it…

Five…four…three…two…one…

A second later, there was a flash of white and the unnamed family were enveloped in a surge of power that tore their tiny frames to pieces, bending them curiously out of shape before separating bodies from heads, arms from torsos, legs from abdomens. The solid-looking house simply crumpled into thin shreds of pulp and instantly ignited into raveling avalanche of flame. A wind-tunnel effect then whisked the body parts and wreckage of furniture and plaster into a horrible whirling mass that was sucked into the tortured atmosphere."

"We were cleaning up my wife's parents' house and found Back to the Future in her brother's room," North wrote in email correspondence. "I flipped through and was instantly struck by how wild the whole thing was and decided to take it home with me."

Back to the Future gave North an original and fun way to talk about literary style and adaptation, a conversation he started by mistake. "The blog itself actually launched by accident—I'd meant to save the first entry as a draft but accidentally published it, which pushed a link to Twitter, and then I was committed."

In the years since the blog wrapped, North had the opportunity to work on a type of novelization of his own: a graphic novel version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V. The process gave him the critical perspective that these books are more translations than adaptations. "You're given a text that is wholly inappropriate for the medium, and your job is to change as much as you can, so it feels at home in this new space, while also maintaining the heart and soul of the original text."

with austin powers trending, heres a reminder of the novelization pic.twitter.com/lEUKf1IXg4

— Awfully Confused Takeo (@MrTacoBelmonto) August 17, 2020

To North, adaptations like Back to the Future have chaotic energy that does not exist today. "Multimedia synergy is controlled and managed, so you can't get out-there novelizations anymore, because it could hurt ‘The Brand,’" he writes. "But it seems like in the 80s, they were thought to be more disposable—people would buy them because they said Back to the Future or Gremlins on the cover, and at that point, you have their money, and it didn't especially matter how good or bad the book was. And that's freeing!"

Today, novelization fans find ways to connect online, either through discussion or creation. "There is a community of novelization fans," writes Holley. "Since I've started the podcast, a group of people has stepped up to support the show. I'll occasionally get boxes of books from people who send me their novelizations, or they were out looking at a used bookstore and saw one that I might like. And they ask for nothing in exchange."

These fans are starting their own projects, removing the need for corporate overlords. The newsletter "Hollywood & Spine" uses Tinyletter to send detailed reviews of novelizations, providing contextual history and analysis for these oft-forgotten tie-ins; MovieNovelizations.com aims to be the IMDB novelizations; and The Godzilla Novelization Project is a writing experiment to create novelized versions of all 32 Japanese Godzilla films.

"The Godzilla Novelization Project is a fan-driven creative endeavor on my part to write full-length, English-language novelizations for every one of the Japanese Godzilla films," writes Daniel DiManna, who founded the Godzilla Novelization Project. "The books are being published online one chapter at a time, and are available free of charge to any monster-loving fan who wants to read them."

This is an opportunity for fans to get into the game. "I started the project as a fun means of filling a void in western kaiju fandom; aside from the American-produced Godzilla films, none of the movies have been adapted to novel from outside Japan," "This project is a way to remedy that, as well as an opportunity to present the cinematic stories that have resonated with generations of fans in a way that they've never experienced before."

"Film novelizations, when done right, can complement their on-screen counterparts with added context, depth, perspective, and emotion," writes DiManna. "The written word can give us a glimpse into the minds of beloved characters, and increase our investment in the universe of the story. I find novelizations to be fascinating and powerful storytelling tools, and not simply 'just the movie in book form.' If that's all they had to offer on a creative and entertainment level, readers around the world wouldn't love them as much as they do."

The art of adapting (or translating) a script to a novel is no easy task. And thanks to corporate negligence, or willful ignorance or just a lack of caring, only a handful of novelization authors have been able to craft bizarre versions of corporate properties. In an age when six media companies control a majority of the IP, the mere hint of originality or plain-old weirdness can be a blessing. That's the juice for readers: Good or bad, to these fans, the book is sometimes better than the movie.