10 Films Whose Novelisations Took On A Life Of Their Own
8. A Nightmare On Elm Street Part III
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors is usually considered the best canon sequel (excluding Wes Craven's New Nightmare). It not only sees the return of Wes Craven as screenwriter to wrap up the arcs of the characters he created, but also saw the best writer/director combo the franchise produced in Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont.
The film was also the hit the franchise needed after Jack Sholder's oddball gay-themed sequel. The novelisation, by Jeffrey Cooper, is a series of what-ifs.
After Craven wrote a draft, Darabont and Russell made significant changes.
They retained Craven's overall narrative - that not one person fighting Freddy would be enough anymore - but kept the setting confined mostly to a mental institution, which only featured briefly at first. They also rewrote the characters to give returning hero Nancy Thompson a psychology degree.
The novelisation is not a complete book, but rather one chapter in standalone book that covers the first three films.
But while the first two were already released, the third was still in production when Cooper was working off Craven's draft. As a result, for the terminally curious, some form of Craven's original script exists.