I remember reading them back in the early 90s (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Far and Away, Back to the Future). They don’t seem to be a thing anymore (or am I just not noticing them).
As an aside I remember liking them but I was a preteen at the time so maybe they were terrible and I just liked the movies.
by Planisher
12 Comments
There are still some novelizations, as you can see in the article below, but they were much more popular before it was so easy to watch movies at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelization
Much less frequent, but still around here and there. It seems increasingly common for movies to be based on a book rather than the other way around because Hollywood is so IP crazy. Even Oppenheimer was based on a particular biography of the man.
Off the top of my head I can say that the recent Godzilla films got novelizations (apparently you can even preorder the novelization of the upcoming Godzilla vs Kong 2), but you’re right in thinking it’s rarer than it once was since I can’t think of any others right now.
When I was a kid I loved the novelizations. They often had additional “scenes” that would add to the story. As an adult, I’m not sure if I would enjoy a novelization or see it as a complete cash grab. Probably depends on the quality of the novelizations, and my general cynicism at the time.
Dragonheart and the Revenge of the Sith novelizations are still two of my favorite books.
There’s a Hackers one.
It’s really bad
They have them for kids at least, my son has a junior novelization of the dungeons and dragons movie we found at target
*The Cat From Outer Space* novelization, by the same guy who wrote the 1978 screenplay, was one of my favourite books when I was a kid.
Yes plenty. Halloween Ends novelization is really good. Even Godzilla Vs Kong has one.
The most recent one I’ve heard of was Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
I think novelizations have the potential to be cool, but the few that I have read felt kind of soulless. They just describe what was on the screen.
I loved movie novelizations when I was a teenager. I still have a handful that were really good—the Goonies was a good book, and The Abyss. I even have a really old novelization of Halloween (tho laughably in that one, Michael Meyers was the reincarnation of a pagan incel!!!) that was respectably scary.
Marvel made some of its movies into kids books recently, I think I saw Far from Home and winter soldier for Probably age group 8-10 or something like that.
Gremlins was pretty good,E.T.the Extraterrestrial on his adventure on Earth by Melissa Mathersson was damned good