Popular books have always been adapted into movies and TV shows but lately it’s become even more of a trend. This year several beloved childhood classics will come to the big screen: Through the Looking Glass, starring Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska. The Jungle Book, starring Scarlet Johansson and Lupita Nyong’o, and Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Also in production are movies based on best-selling novels Nicholas Sparks’s The Choice, Paula Hawkins’s Girl on the Train and Dan Brown’s Inferno.
Several acclaimed literary novels are also being made into movies. Reviewers called Philip Roth’s American Pastoral a “20th century American masterpiece.” Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King was a National Book Award finalist. And M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans, about a lighthouse keeper, his wife and an orphaned baby, has been described as “irresistible”, “seductive” and “heart-rending.”
Women’s fiction novels debuting on the big screen include Jojo Moyes’s wrenching love story, Me Before You, and the much glitzier How to be Single by Liz Tuccillo. Liane Moriarty’s seriocomic novel Big Little Lies, about three modern Australian women, will soon to be an HBO series.
YA fiction has become a major source for movie scripts (The Hunger Games and the Allegiant series) and the trend continues with upcoming adaptations of the intergalactic Illuminae trilogy, the alien invasion tale 5th Wave, the haunting Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and Nerve, about a deadly high-stakes online game.
Several adult speculative fiction novels are also in movie production. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline combines virtual reality and a dystopian society, The Magicians, based on a fantasy trilogy by Lev Grossman, centers around a secret university specializing in magic.
In addition to popular novels, the entertainment industry is turning more and more to non-fiction sources. Adaptations of memoirs such as The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman and The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker will premiere this year. Other topical books being made into movies are The Lost City of Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, and 13 Hours, The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi.
The library has copies of all these titles, if you like to read the book before seeing the movie.
~Mary G.