Much like a shark will scent the newly spilled blood of its prey, the movie industry has been gobbling up the movie rights to many of the most acclaimed books, the most noteworthy of these being The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, and Beautiful Creatures.
With a staggering $214 million domestically in its opening weekend, The Hunger Games reached such levels as with Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. These movie franchises had years to build up a fan base and increase earnings. “The first movie in a series, to post a number like this, is really insane,” said the editor of BoxOffice.com, Phil Contrino.
Sam Johnson, TAHS sophomore, says The Hunger Games is her “favorite book-turned-movie.”
As with most everything, producers have been looking to follow The Hunger Games’ success, buying up scores of the most popular books’ movie rights.
However, some of these books-turned-movies achieved success even before The Hunger Games paved the way. For instance, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the first of which being made in 2010, has another movie coming out in August, and the blockbuster Harry Potter movies raked in a total of almost $3,000,000,000. The Twilight Saga made around $1.5 billion.
In fact, Twilight was indeed one of the first major series to be turned into movies, and these newer movies each try to earn the title of “the next twilight.” It seems that young adult books are the focus of this scrabble, with City of Bones, Beautiful Creatures, The Hunger Games, and a whole list of others trying to be dubbed better than the others.
Not only newer books are made into movies, however. The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, was recently converted, much to the excitement of most of the population of America. This is shown in the domestic total of $300 million. Though this may seem to be a bit of a disappointment, this is just for one movie, while some of the higher totals mentioned in this article have five or more movies.
Mrs. Dobrowolsky, an English teacher, said that her favorite “would definitely be To Kill a Mockingbird,” which first was published in 1960.
All in all, book readers, look out for the next barrage of books to be turned into movies.
