Films based on books might have the intolerable disadvantage of people smugly claiming “the book is so much better”, but they also result in a huge boost at the box office.
According to new research from the Publishers Association, films based on books take 44 per cent more at the box office in the UK and 53 per cent more worldwide than original screenplays.
The report’s findings showed that films based originally on literary sources “tend to have substantially higher grosses” than those based on original scripts.
Using data from the British Film Institute (BFI), the BBC and Nielsen BookScan the report found that 43 per cent of the top 20 box office-grossing films in the between 2007 and 2016 were based on books, with a further 9 per cent based on comic books.
“In short, published material is the basis of 52 per cent of top films in the last 10 years, and accounts for an even higher share of revenue from these leading performers, at 61 per cent of box office gross and 65 per cent of worldwide gross,” the report reads.
Television was similarly influenced by books, with 14 of 35 of the top series produced between January and September 2017 being pulled from the pages of bestsellers.
No doubt we’ll be seeing an even bigger deluge of adaptations on our big screens, and even more reasons to give up on that novel you’ve been ignoring for months.
