: Re: How may a book and movie be one? How could a movie be paired to coincide with a book and come out at the same time? I would like to know if a book and a movie can be written to complement

@Carla500

Vote Up Vote Down

This is definitely done and it's called novelization. Many of the movies you've seen may have one (sometimes more) even though you're probably not aware of it. Series also may have novelizations. (The term "novelization" also covers books that were done well after the movie was made.)

How it works is that the movie, being the big ticket item, drives the direction of the book, but the book is usually able to expand and explain some of the stuff that was left out of the movie. Some people enjoy doing this type of writing, but it's often subject to the whims of the people doing the movie:

The half-dozen authors I spoke to all had their fair share of difficulties when it came to dealing with the bigwigs behind these properties, from being given a lack of information about the film to impossibly quick turnaround times (try writing a book in a nine-day span, like Max Allan Collins did on In the Line of Fire) to last-minute rewrites of the script. Terry Brooks was forced to deal with the latter situation on Steven Spielberg’s 1991 flick, Hook.
Yes, People Still Read Movie Novelizations . . . And Write Them, Too

In other cases, the book is based on an early draft of the script or it just takes liberties and makes changes, so the movie and the book don't end up matching.

And sometimes the book even comes out before the movie it's based on. One example I'm aware of is Ralph Breaks the Internet, which came out November 5, 2018 while one of its novelizations came out October 9, 2018.

Here are some lists of novelizations:

PaperBackSwap
Goodreads: Favorite Movie-Tie-Ins
TVTropes: Novelization

(0)

Login to post a comment!