David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens in theaters on October 3rd, 2014. Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl – the book on which the feature film is based – was published just over two years ago on June 5th, 2012. That’s some pretty quick turnaround.
But then, this is nothing new for Hollywood. Ever since feature films have begun, filmmakers have been quick to cash in on brand new literary crazes, eager to snag a handily built-in audience. If a pop novel has even the slightest whiff of a cult forming around it, film studios have always been slyly attentive and sprightly about turning those books into screenplays, regardless of the book’s genre, demographic, or, lamentably, quality. Some pundits have mourned the dwindling readership of this grand nation of ours, but if Hollywood is any sort of reliable indicator, people are still eating up books with an unmatched voraciousness, and attending the film adaptations of said books in droves. How much money did The Hunger Games make again?
Related: Listen to Four Trent Reznor Tracks from ‘Gone Girl’
And while this ongoing novel-to-film trend has provided us with numerous bad movies, a quick look back reveals that some really great films – indeed some of the greatest films of all time – have been, essentially, quick exploitative reaches into the pockets of the literary audience. Let’s take a look at some of the films Gone Girl is trying to live up to.
Slideshow: 14 Great Movies That Cashed in on Recent Best-Sellers
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Great Novel Cash-Ins
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All Quiet on the Western Front (Book 1929, Movie 1930)
Erich Maria Remarque's tragic damnation of war has become standard reading for many high school students, as it is perhaps one of the most moving and depressing depictions of combat ever printed. Lewis Milestone's celebrated feature film, released a year and a half after the book's publication, is one of the greatest war films of all time, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture and for Best Director. To this day, both the book and the feature film have a gut-wrenching impact.
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Gone with the Wind (Book 1936, Movie 1939)
Margaret Mitchell's enormous Pulitzer-winning tome about the fall of the Old South, told through the eyes of one of modern literature's most delightfully selfish antiheroes, Scarlett O'Hara, was a sensation when it was first released, launching the popularity of a new brand of novel: The historical potboiler. I don't think I need to catch you up on Victor Fleming's insanely popular 1939 feature film starring Vivian Leigh, as it remains, to this day, the most financially successful film of all time (when adjusted for inflation), and the winner of 10 Academy Awards.
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Lolita (Book 1958, Movie 1962)
Vladimir Nabokov's touchy and daring love story about a grown man who has a sexual affair with a 12-year-old girl has been called by some critics as the best novel of the 20th century. And it is great. Nabokov doesn't just write, but constantly celebrates the English word with every glorious sentence. And while the content of the book sounds prurient and naughty, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick knew better than to play that angle when adapting the novel to film. With Nabokov's help, the film of Lolita became a winking comedy of manners. Ironically, it was the 1997 adaptation of the book – the one made without the original author's help – that was more loyal to the source material.
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Psycho (Book 1959, Movie 1960)
Inspired partly by serial killer Ed Gein who had been apprehended two years prior, author Robert Bloch wrote a bloody crime novel called Psycho about a motel owner who slays a passer-by. In 1959, Alfred Hitchcock was looking for something to follow up his mega-hit North By Northwest when he stumbled upon the lurid murder tale. The rest, as they say, is history. Psycho is one of the most famous of all horror movies, and Hitchcock's most famous as well.
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Rosemary's Baby (Book 1967, Movie 1968)
In the late 1960s and lasting throughout the 1970s, adaptations of horrific, bloody, and otherwise terrifying novels became de rigueur for Hollywood. The best and most high-profile of the 1960s horror novels was probably Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, a book about a woman who begins to suspect she is carrying Satan's child. The year after the book made a stir, producer William Castle and director Roman Polanski made the still-amazing feature film version. Like Psycho, the book was eclipsed by the popularity of the film, which won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for Best Screenplay.
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The Exorcist (Book 1971, Movie 1973)
William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist was a hit at the time, but it took William Friedkin's famed film version to turn this terrifying tale of a young girl under the influence of a supernatural satanic force into one of the greatest horror yarns of all time. The Exorcist is often held up as one of the defining stories of all horror fiction, and one of the best films of the 1970s, a notoriously great time for American film. The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
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Death Wish (Book 1972, Movie 1974)
Cynicism and doubt marked America the 1970s, and our films reflected that. In addition to The Exorcist, we had depressing and downbeat (but nonetheless great) tragedies like Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter to contend with. People became poor and fearful, and revenge fantasies were on everyone's mind. Into this milieu stepped author Brian Garfield, and his infamous novel Death Wish. The book followed a liberal CPA who becomes a violent right-leaning vigilante in the wake of his family's assault and murder. The film version hit theaters a year and a half later, and codified lead actor Charles Bronson as an action star.
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Carrie (Book 1974, Movie 1976)
The world of film would be a paltry place without the presence of Stephen King. Although dozens of King's novels have been adapted to film, the first to strike into cinematic territory was his 1974 novel Carrie, about an abused teenage girl who finds that she is growing bizarre psychic powers. In 1976, director Brian De Palma turned King's lurid novel into an equally lurid revenge tale starring Sissy Spacek. The movie features one of the bloodiest and most exhilarating climaxes in horror movie history. Ignore the remake(s).
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The Silence of the Lambs (Book 1988, Movie 1991)
Although Thomas Harris' 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs was something of a potboiler on the page (and itself a sequel to an equally potboiler-y 1981 story with some of the same characters), Jonathan Demme famously took the material three years later, and turned it into a funereal, psychologically complex feature film of classic proportions. The film famously netted the “Big Five” Academy Awards that year: Picture, Screenplay, Director, Actor, and Actress.
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The Firm (Book 1991, Movie 1993)
I grew up in the 1990s, so the name of John Grisham is writ large in my mind; there was a time when it seemed a John Grisham novel was being adapted to film every month. Grisham started his career as a lawyer, eventually authoring a series of well-regarded and high-selling legal thrillers. The first high-profile John Grisham film adaptation came in 1993 with The Firm, a vehicle for Tom Cruise. It was an enormous hit, and John Grisham's influence over Hollywood had officially begun.
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Angela's Ashes (Book 1996, Movie 1999)
I have not read Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela's Ashes, but I do distinctly recall a time when it seemed everyone was reading it. I don't know what caused this craze for Irish autobiography, but it proved to be popular enough to warrant a fictionalized film version in 1999, directed by Alan Parker. The film is a bit dreary, but does reveal facets of Irish culture not usually explored in feature films.
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Book 1998, Movie 2001)
You know Harry Potter. The world knows Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling is one of the wealthiest people on the planet thanks to Harry Potter. This series of books starring a boy wizard and his journey to murder an evil snake man proved to be one of the biggest literary phenomena of the decade, and the films were naturally going to follow. Not only did the books inspire eight movies, but every subsequent YA series of books, and their subsequent movie adaptations. Everything from The Hunger Games to The Seeker owe their lives directly to Harry Potter.
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Let the Right One In (Book 2004, Movies 2008 and 2010)
John Ajvide Lindqvist wrote a Stephen King-like vampire novel in 2004 called Låt den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One In), which twined vampire mythology with the angst of being a 12-year-old. The book was lurid and featured all manner of twisted sex. The 2008 feature film, directed by Tomas Alfredson, cut out a lot of the more explicit sexuality of the book, but left us with a rather masterful story of young love and weird vampire affection. It's been called one of the best vampire films ever. In 2010, the book was adapted again, this time in English, and called simply Let Me In. That's three versions of the story in 6 years.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Book 2005, Movie 2009 and 2011)
Sweden really made a boom in the literary market in the '00s, and the crown jewel in the still-new Scandinavian Crime Drama genre is Stieg Larsson's 2005 novel Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (literally Men Who Hate Women, although translated in America as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). This was a solid and pleasing and lurid airport novel through-and-through, full of audience-grabbing sex and violence, but possessed of a strong feminist undercurrent. The 2009 Swedish-language film, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, captured the airport tone of the book, making it thrilling. The 2011 English-language version by David Fincher... that one wasn't so good.
