4. Growth In Literary Movies
"I've thought of an ending for my book - 'And he lived happily ever after... to the end of his days.'" Now, we can't give Peter Jackson too much credit for this. Movies have been being made off of books since the dawn of film. In times past, though, most of the novels that were put on the silver screen were dramatic pieces (Gone with the Wind, To Kill A Mockingbird, anything by Jane Austen). As special effects technology grew, though, it became possible to explore more literature that was previously seen as unfilmable (and we'll get to that in a bit). Since Lord of the Rings came out, scores of movies have attempted to capitalize on this new found treasure trove of material that can seriously be considered for adaptation. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, Eragon, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and numerous others all count themselves among the list of films that received the full motion picture treatment, sometimes even before they had time to build a large reader base (as was the case with Eragon, which was published in 2002, and The Spiderwick Chronicles in 2005). These days, if you have an idea for an amazing story with a lot of well-developed characters and imaginative landscapes and you'd like to see it be made into a movie, your best bet is to write a novel first. In contrast, we can be fairly certain that when Tolkien published The Hobbit back in 1937, a talkie was the last thing on his mind. In fact, even as recently as the 90s, when books like the Goosebumps or Animorphs series were the hot craze with teens, studios weren't looking for their next blockbuster hit on those shelves. Things like Twilight and The Hunger Games very obviously point to a shift in that trend.