Adaptations Part Five: Novelizations
Some of the works in question…
First: “junior novelizations,” which are young reader book versions of movies. I’ve read one: Jurassic Park but I saw the movie first and then later, read the orignal novel by Michael Crichton.
So my journey through Jurassic Park was trailer, movie, junior novel, original novel.
The junior novel, as I remember it, is just a simplified and noticeably tamer version of the movie. No swearing, gore, toned down terror, etc. It read much like a Goosebumps kids novel, which were booming at the time.
Second, there is the odd case of 2001: A Space Odyssey which was a novel written in conjuction with the film production, yet it was the film’s director Stanley Kubrick, who dictated the content of both versions. The rectangular monolith in the film was Kubrick’s idea, but so was the pyramid in the novel. Yet in the movie, the monolith is shot to resemble a pyramid.
So what was going on? Hard to tell, but certainly an interesting production history. Do you know any others where the book and movie where made at the same, or almost the same time?
Third, expanded universe novels. Star Wars you say? Yes, but also the game Halo and even Doom! I actually read the first two Doom novels which came out soon after the first two games and are based on them. The 2005 movie version didn’t reference them at all. The third and fourth novel go off in a wild direction of cosmic war that kind of gives off some vibes from the Doom remake series that started in 2016.
Do you know any others? Drop your thoughts.
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Michael Dzurak Here are some: Argyle (2024); Star Wars : The High Republic (2021-present); The Shape Of Water (2017); The Abyss (1989) collaboration between James Cameron and Orson Scott Card. There are a few more, but they are all, including 2001, companion novels, not adaptations or true "transmedia" ideas. These prove the rule: true transmedia, though a wonderful idea for people who want to dream worlds, is not done in the real world. Each media is its own challenge with its own aesthetic and its own audience which does not necessarily go with the film audience. The development and marketing time and budget of such a project rises to literally an order of magnitude beyond the budget of a single part of it. The one "exception" above emphasizes this. Star Wars The HIgh Republic was developed as a wide transmedia franchise from the beginning. However, the franchise has a billion dollars to work with and near 50 years of multimedia and transmedia already IP behind it. The others I found all have A-list or beyond A-list leaders in charge.
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That's very interesting. I actually don't know much about the Star Wars expanded universe, but it's just massive.
I also just realized that while First Blood (1982) is a book to screen adaptation, but Rambo: First Blood, part II and Rambo III are novelizations, albeit by the same author, David Morrell. These read like an almost parallel universe as they're essentially the same story, but with many surface changes and a lot more detail. As you put it, "each media is its own challenge with its own aesthetic and its own audience which does not necessarily go with the film audience."
I actually read Rambo: First Blood, part II (wild title!) when my parents still barred me from R-rated movies. I picked it up for 50 cents at a used book sale. For a timid 12 year old, it was... an interesting read.
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Interesting breakdown Michael Dzurak! For simultaneous book and film, The Princess Bride is close. Kubrick and Clarke worked separately after a point. That's why the monolith is a rectangle in the film and a pyramid in the book. Doom novels are a deep cut. I didn't know those existed. Thanks for sharing.
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Ah, yes I remember The Princess Bride, Sam Rivera. The movie adaptation is even framed as a boy being read the book by his grandfather, which I found interesting. The book by William Goldman is itself an adaptation of sorts and he wrote the screenplay for the 1987 film. Metafictional.
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Michael Dzurak , this post genuinely sparked my curiosity. I went down a rabbit hole after reading it.
The 2001: A Space Odyssey example is wild. The fact that Kubrick was dictating both versions in parallel, with the monolith and the pyramid as visual cousins of each other, is exactly the kind of transmedia decision-making that we don't talk about enough.
Your post sent me searching for more examples, and I came across this fun list of films that were turned into books (or had their book counterparts created alongside them): https://bookscouter.com/blog/movies-turned-into-books/
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Thanks for the link, Ashley Renée Smith. You reminded me that I actually read the novelization of Independence Day soon after the movie came out. And the first thing I remembered was the description of the alien heads "exploding like bloody popcorn" when Hiller launches the missile into the alien mothership. In the movie, the scene is no where near that graphic. I also read the novelization for Free Willy (1993). Now I'm going down a rabbit hole!!
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Really interesting discussion, Michael.
What fascinates me most about novelizations and parallel adaptations is how differently emotion can behave across mediums. A screenplay often relies on image, silence, rhythm, and visual implication — while prose allows you to enter interior thought, memory, and psychological texture in a much deeper way.
Lately, moving between novels and screenwriting myself has made me appreciate how some stories naturally expand when translated into prose, while others become more powerful through cinematic restraint.
I also find projects developed simultaneously across mediums incredibly fascinating because they almost become alternate interpretations of the same core idea rather than direct adaptations.
Great topic.
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Big screen thrillers "JAWS," of course. Small screen "The Winds of War" from Herman Wouk, and "The Stand" from Stephen King.
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I've written a ton of tie-in novels to TV shows--Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, the various CSIs and NCISs, Narcos, Star Trek, Charmed, etc., but only one novelization of a movie--Eric Kripke's Boogeyman, from Sony. That was an...let's say, interesting...process. After working on it for weeks, I came upon a character in the script--not a main character, someone very secondary or tertiary--who hadn't popped up before. I'd been looking at casting to get descriptions of the characters based on who would be playing them in the film (I was writing while filming was underway,), and I couldn't find any casting info for that character. I asked my editor about it, and he asked Sony, and they eventually said, "Oh, we forgot to give you the newest script."
I think during the writing process I saw three drafts of the script, and where elements weren't contradicted, I included them even if they weren't in the most recent version, because they provided backstory, motivation, etc. When the movie was finally cut and released, most of that stuff was gone, and the movie barely seemed to make any coherent sense. The screenwriters read my book and preferred it over the finished film because it was a much more satisfying story, and closer to their vision. Of course, the readership of the novel was much smaller than the viewership of the film, and Eric has gone on to bigger and better things. I got to work with his material one more time when I wrote the second tie-in novel for the series Supernatural.
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The pre-Disney Star Wars expanded universe of novels, comics, and video games is THE example of how to expand a franchise beyond film. The old EU was basically a separate universe in and of itself with many fan-favorite characters who only exist in media outside of film or TV. Many of the most popular Star Wars stories came from the old Eu as well, including my personal favorite Star Wars media, the Knights of the Old Republic I and II video games.
It's baffling how Disney already had a blueprint for success, plus some examples of failures to avoid, and they chose to ignore all of the old EU in favor of much more inferior stories. And the few times they have taken something from the EU, such as the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn, they've made him so much dumber than he was in the books that they might as well have just made a new character.
The old EU was something truly special. Not something that existed to bolster or support the main films, but a whole living, breathing universe that took on a life of its own beyond the core George Lucas films. That was a big part of the magic of Star Wars: it was a fan-made mythology just as much as it was a series of films. It was like modern folklore, ever expanding and evolving in new and interesting ways. It's something I haven't seen any other film or TV series be able to duplicate since. I miss the old EU dearly.
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Jeffrey J. Mariotte There was a similar issue that I brought up in -- https://www.stage32.com/lounge/transmedia/Film-Adaptations-transposing-I... -- where the tie-in game for the film Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever was based on a script that wasn't the film's final shooting script. The result was people saying "huh?" a lot.
Congrats on the writing career with a very interesting looking output. How did you get into that? And which project was your fave?
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Jeffrey Pemberton I read Tales of the Bountry Hunters from the pre-Disney Star Wars universe and it was pretty good. It read like five novellas compiled into one volume that offered lots of detail to who were mostly background film characters. Save for Boba Fett, he had a bigger role and thus the longest story in the volume.
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Michael Dzurak I like that book too. The Dengar story was my favorite.
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Michael Dzurak, my first tie-in novel was based on comic book characters I had written in comics--Gen13, from WildStorm Productions/Image Comics (where I was also VP of Marketing). We produced an animated Gen13 feature and sold it to Disney, and Ace Books acquired rights to do three tie-in novels. They contracted a friend named Christopher Golden to write the first, and he asked me to collaborate on it. I did, then I wrote the second and invited another friend, Scott Ciencin, to take part. A different writer wrote the third. But Disney shelved the feature and never released it. Paramount released it internationally, so there are copies out there, and it's on YouTube.
Another bizarro tie-in story--for another publisher I was hired to write a 4-issue comic book miniseries adaptation of Terminator: Salvation. The script they gave us to work from was missing the final pages because they were terrified that somebody would reveal the ending (even though the first issue was scheduled to release when the film did, so the final issue wouldn't be out until well after the ending was known). So I wrote it without revealing the ending, since I didn't know it. But after the first issue came out, they demanded that we not release any more issues. So issue 1 (of 4) is the only one that exists, because the production company was terrified that we'd reveal an ending we didn't know.
My favorite? Probably the CSI stuff. The staff was great--welcomed me into the CSI family, set up an interview with Anthony Zuiker, had me up to the CSI: Miami set to pass out copies of of the first CSI: Miami graphic novel to cast members, which was filmed by Access Hollywood (which left me on the cutting-room floor but showed the book). And they used an original graphic novel of mine in the opening of a season 10 CSI episode. I wrote three novels for the Vegas series and one for Miami, plus comics for both of those, and as an editor I ran the comics line. Terrific people at the production company and at CBS, all of whom are still friends.
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Jeffrey J. Mariotte That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.