A novelization (or novelisation) is a derivativenovel that adapts the story of a work created for another medium, such as a film, TV series, stage play, comic book, or video game. Film novelizations were particularly popular before the advent of home video, but continue to find commercial success as part of marketing campaigns for major films. They are often written by accomplished writers based on an early draft of the film's script and on a tight deadline.
Novelization of chapter 8 of the film series Les Vampires (1915–16)
Novelizations of films began to be produced in the 1910s and 1920s for silent films such as Les Vampires (1915–16) and London After Midnight (1927). One of the first films with spoken dialogue to be novelized was King Kong (1933). Film novelizations were especially profitable during the 1970s before home video became available,[1] as they were then the only way to re-experience popular movies other than television airing or a rerelease in theaters. The novelizations of Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) sold millions of copies.[2]
The first ever video game to be novelised was Shadowkeep, in 1984.[3]
Even after the advent of home video, film novelizations remain popular, with the adaptation of Godzilla (2014) being included on The New York Times Best Seller list for mass-market paperbacks. This has been attributed to these novels' appeal to fans: about 50% of novelizations are sold to people who have watched the film and want to explore its characters further, or to reconnect to the enthusiasm they experienced when watching the film.[2] A film is therefore also a sort of commercial for its novelization; the film's success or failure affects the novelization's sales.[4] Conversely, film novelizations help generate publicity for upcoming films, serving as a link in the film's marketing chain.[5]
According to publishing industry estimates, about one or two percent of the audience of a film will buy its novelization. This makes these relatively inexpensively produced works a commercially attractive proposition in the case of blockbuster film franchises. The increasing number of previously established novelists taking on tie-in works has been credited with these works gaining a "patina of respectability" after they had previously been disregarded in literary circles as derivative and mere merchandise.[6]
Variants
Film
King Kong (1932) novelization of King Kong (1933)
The writer of a novelization is supposed to multiply the 20,000–25,000 words of a screenplay into at least 60,000 words.[4] Writers usually achieve that by adding description or introspection.[5] Ambitious writers are driven to work on transitions and characters just to accomplish "a more prose-worthy format". Sometimes the "novelizer" invents new scenes in order to give the plot "added dimension", provided they are allowed to do that.[7] Publishers aim to have novelizations in shops before a film is released, which means it is usually necessary to base the novelization on a screenplay instead of the completed film.[8] It might take an insider to tell whether a novelization diverges unintentionally from the final film because it is based on an earlier version which included deleted scenes.[1] Thus the novelization occasionally presents material which will later on appear in a director's cut.[9] In some cases, separate novelizations of the same film are written for publication in different countries, and these may be based on different drafts of the screenplay, as was very clearly the case with the American and British novelizations of Capricorn One.[8] Writers select different approaches to enrich a screenplay. Dewey Gram's Gladiator, for example, included historical background information.
If a film is based on a novel, the original novel is generally reissued with a cover based on the film's poster.[10] If a film company also wishes to have a separate novelization published, the company is supposed to approach the author who has "Separated Rights". A writer has these rights if he contributed the source material (or added a great deal of creative input to it) and if he was moreover properly credited.[11]
Acquiring editors looking for a novelizer have different issues. The author may not have all of the information needed; Foster wrote the Alien novelization without knowing what the Xenomorph looked like. The contract may be very restrictive; Max Allan Collins had to write the novelization for Road to Perdition only based on the film, without the detail he had created for the graphic novel of the same name that the film is based on.[2] Rewrites of scripts may force last-minute novelization rewrites. The script for the 1966 film Modesty Blaise was rewritten by five different authors.[14] The writer or script doctor responsible for the so-called "final" version is not necessarily the artist who has contributed the original idea or most of the scenes. The patchwork character of a film script might even exacerbate because the film director, a principal actor or a consulting script doctor does rewrites during the shooting. An acquiring editor who intends to hire one of the credited screenwriters has to reckon that the early writers are no longer familiar with the current draft or work already on another film script. Not every screenwriter is available, willing to work for less money than what can be earned with film scripts and able to deliver the required amount of prose on time. Even if so, there is still the matter of novelizations having a questionable reputation.[15] The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers concedes that by saying their craft is "largely unrecognized".[16]Writers Guild of America rules require that screenwriters have right of first refusal to write novelizations of their own films, but they rarely do so because of the lack of prestige and money.[4]
While comic books such as the series Classics Illustrated have often provided adaptations of novels, novelizations of comics are relatively rare.[20]The Adventures of Superman, written by George Lowther and published in 1942, is the first novelization of a comic book character.
Video games
Video games are novelized in the same manner as films. While gamers might enjoy playing a certain action scene for hours, the buyers of a novelization might be bored soon if they merely read about such a scene. Consequently, the writer will have to cut down on the action.[7]
Authors
Novelization writers are often also accomplished original fiction writers, as well as fans of the works they adapt, which helps motivate them to undertake a commission that is generally compensated with a relatively low flat fee. Alan Dean Foster, for example, said that, as a fan, "I got to make my own director's cut. I got to fix the science mistakes, I got to enlarge on the characters, if there was a scene I particularly liked, I got to do more of it, and I had an unlimited budget. So it was fun".[2]
Writing skill is particularly needed for challenging situations common to writing novelizations of popular media, such as lack of access to information about the film, last-minute script changes and very quick turnaround times. Collins had to write the novelization of In the Line of Fire in nine days.[2]
Although novelizations tend to have a low prestige, and are often viewed as "hackwork",[2] several critically acclaimed literary authors have written novelizations, including, Arthur Calder-Marshall,[21]William Kotzwinkle[22] and Richard Elman.[23] Best-selling author Ken Follett, early in his career, also wrote a novelization, and so did Isaac Asimov, later in his career.[24][25] While increasingly also a domain of previously established novelists, tie-in writing still has the disadvantages, from the writers' point of view, of modest pay, tight deadlines and no ownership in the intellectual property created.[6]
The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is an American association that aims to recognize the writers of adapted and tie-in fiction. It hands out annual awards, the "Scribes", in categories including "best adapted novel".[2]
TV series
Doctor Who had stories novelised in particular from the era of its original series published by Target Books.
Episodes of Star Trek were adapted into short stories by the noted science fiction writer James Blish. Each volume of the stories included a number of the short story adaptations. Alan Dean Foster would later adapt the follow-up animated series into the Star Trek Log series.
Mel Gilden wrote novelizations of Beverly Hills, 90210, merging three episodes into one book. As he explained, this approach required him to look for a joint story arc.[15]
Comics
In the early 1970s Lee Falk was asked by the Avon publishing house to deliver Phantom novels based on the eponymous comic strip. Falk worked on the novelizations on his own and with collaboration. A dispute over how he would be credited led to the cessation of the series.[26]
Peter O'Donnell, who scripted the Modesty Blaise comic strip, later authored novels featuring the character not directly based on the stories presented in the strips.
Video games
Matt Forbeck became a writer of novels based on video games after he had been "writing tabletop roleplaying game books for over a decade".[27] He worked also as a designer of video games.
In some cases an otherwise standard novel may be based on an unfilmed screenplay. Ian Fleming's 1961 James Bond novel Thunderball was based on a script he had co-written; in this case his collaborators subsequently sued for plagiarism.[29]
Peter O'Donnell's novel Modesty Blaise was a novelization of a refused film script. In this case the creator of the main character had written the script alone, but later on other authors had changed O'Donnell's original script over and over, until merely one single sentence remained from the original.[14][30][31] The novel was released a year before the film and unlike the film it had sequels.
Occasionally a novelization is issued even though the film is never made. Gordon Williams wrote the script and novelization for producer Harry Saltzman's abandoned film The Micronauts.[35]
The James Bond series focuses on the titular character, a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2022. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny.
William Goldman was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist before turning to screenwriting. Among other accolades, Goldman won two Academy Awards in both writing categories—once for Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and once for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men (1976).
Modesty Blaise is a British comic strip featuring a fictional character of the same name, created by author Peter O'Donnell and illustrator Jim Holdaway in 1963. The strip follows Modesty Blaise, an exceptional young woman with many talents and a criminal past, and her trusty sidekick Willie Garvin. It was adapted into films in 1966, 1982, and 2003, and from 1965 onwards, 11 novels and two short-story collections were written.
James Myers Thompson was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.
Peter O'Donnell was an English writer of mysteries and of comic strips, best known as the creator of Modesty Blaise, an action heroine/undercover trouble-shooter. He was also an award-winning gothic historical romance novelist who wrote under the female pseudonym Madeleine Brent, in 1978, his novel Merlin's Keep won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Nicholas Meyer is an American screenwriter, director and author known for his best-selling novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and for directing the films Time After Time, two of the Star Trek feature films, the 1983 television film The Day After, and the 1999 HBO original film Vendetta.
Rambo is an American media franchise centered on a series of action films featuring John J. Rambo. The five films are First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Rambo (2008), and Rambo: Last Blood (2019). Rambo is a United States Army Special Forces veteran played by Sylvester Stallone, whose Vietnam War experience traumatized him but also gave him superior military skills, which he has used to fight corrupt police officers, enemy troops and drug cartels. First Blood is an adaptation of the 1972 novel First Blood by David Morrell.
Thomas Nigel Kneale was a Manx screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.
David Hayter is a Canadian-American actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. He is well known as the English-language voice actor for Solid Snake and Naked Snake in the Metal Gear video game series. He wrote the film X-Men and co-wrote X2 and Watchmen, and was awarded the Saturn Award for Best Writing in 2000 for his work on X-Men. Hayter voiced King Shark on The Flash.
Raymond Benson is an American writer known for his James Bond novels published between 1997 and 2003.
Sean Hood is an American screenwriter and film director.
Modesty Blaise is an action-adventure/spy fiction novel by Peter O'Donnell first published in 1965, featuring the character Modesty Blaise, whom O'Donnell had created for a comic strip in 1963.
Chris Terrio is an American screenwriter and film director. He is best known for writing the screenplay for the 2012 film Argo, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Terrio also won the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 2012 and was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, a BAFTA, and the 2013 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for this work.
Modesty Blaise is a 1966 British spy-fi comedy film directed by Joseph Losey, produced by Joseph Janni, and loosely based on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell, who co-wrote the original story upon which Evan Jones and Harold Pinter based their screenplay. It stars Monica Vitti as "Modesty", opposite Terence Stamp as Willie Garvin and Dirk Bogarde as her nemesis Gabriel. The cast also includes Harry Andrews, Michael Craig, Alexander Knox, Rossella Falk, Clive Revill, and Tina Aumont. The film's music was composed by Johnny Dankworth and the theme song, Modesty, sung by pop duo David and Jonathan. It was Vitti's first English-speaking role.
Anthony McCarten is a New Zealand writer and filmmaker. He is best known for writing big-budget biopics The Theory of Everything (2014), Darkest Hour (2017), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), The Two Popes (2019), and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022). McCarten has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including twice for Best Adapted Screenplay, for The Theory of Everything and The Two Popes.
Mitch Brian is an American television writer, screenwriter and film director. He has sold, optioned or written on assignment more than 25 scripts to major studios, networks and independent production companies. Having grown up in Hutchinson, Kansas, he attended film school at California State University, Northridge.
Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, and producer. She is known for writing the thriller and mystery novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl (2012), which are all critically acclaimed. Her books have been published in 40 languages, and according to The Washington Post, as of 2016 Gone Girl alone has sold more than 15 million copies.
Michael Green is an American writer and producer. In addition to writing for television, Green has written or co-written several feature film screenplays, including Logan, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049 and Murder on the Orient Express, all released in 2017. For Logan, which he co-wrote with James Mangold and Scott Frank, Green was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Project Itoh, real name Satoshi Itō, was a Japanese science fiction writer and essayist.
Michael H. Weber is an American screenwriter and producer. He and his writing partner, Scott Neustadter, are best known for writing the screenplay for the romantic comedy film 500 Days of Summer. The film is based on two real relationships Neustadter had. They also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the novels The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars, and Paper Towns.
1 2 "Movies and TV". The Modesty Blaise Book Covers. Archived from the original on May 16, 2012. Retrieved March 28, 2013. Peter O'Donnell's script was rewritten by five different writers, until only one line of the original remained
Britton, Wesley Alan (2005). Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Praeger. ISBN0-275-98556-3.
Hamilton, Geoff & Jones, Brian (2009). Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction. Facts on File. ISBN978-0-8160-7157-9.
Pringle, David (1998). St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers. St. James Press. ISBN1-55862-206-3.
Shatzky, Joel & Taub, Michael, eds. (1997). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press. ISBN0-313-29462-3.
Turner, Richard Charles (1996). Ken Follett: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press. ISBN0-313-29415-1.
Further reading
Baetens, Jan (2007). "From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent". In Cartmell, Deborah; Whelehan, Imelda (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.226–38.
Baetens, Jan; Lits, Marc, eds. (2004). La Novellisation: Du film au livre[Novelization: From Film to Novel] (in French). Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Siskind, Mariano (2010). "The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature". Comparative Literature. 62 (4): 336–360. doi:10.1215/00104124-2010-021. JSTOR40962923.
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