Novelizations that Could have Improved their Movies
Novelizations are great ways to to keep the excitement and love of a movie alive. To relive your favorite parts, and uncover deleted or unused scenes are a fan's dream. Anything to keep that experience going and to learn more about the fandom. While novelizations aren't always good they're still an interesting avenue to take on certain movies where a writer could expand upon a sloppy scene that made it to the final cut of the film. Instead of asking what the best novelizations are, today's post will be looking at three movies that could have been improved by a novelization.
The first movie that should have gotten a novelization would have been the 2015 science fiction feature by the name of Chappie by Neill Blomkamp. It was met by an overwhelming wave of negative reviews, myself included. It wasn't until the third watch that I started to see the potential and what Blomkamp was trying to do with this property. From there the film became more enjoyable, and after the fourth and fifth watch it became my favorite film by him, but that doesn't change the fact that it's difficult to get into. The leads for this film are not actors, which will probably be the biggest hurdle for everyone, and they will either make or break the film you. The reason this would be ripe for a novelization is because you can change the perception of them. A novel would go deeper on the Ninja and Yolandi characters and also explain the world better. The film already has the science fiction and heart, it just needs the space to flesh out its leads and even more to explore the heavy themes of AI and immortality. Blomkamp did state that he imagined this as the first in a trilogy, so maybe the second and third films could be made into novels instead like the Stargate books.
The second movie that deserved a novelization, and one that I desperately wished had from the moment I saw it, would be David Ayer's Netflix film, Bright. Ayer's style very much comes from the street level characters, with films like End of Watch and Fury, so a fantasy epic like Bright was a step out of his comfort zone. He keeps the movie grounded by focusing on two cops, leaving the heavy magic towards the end, and filling everything in between with gorgeous makeup. However, the focus of street level characters in such a massive world took away from the weird, world building, and quite frankly more interesting aspects of the film when it focuses on a simple racism allegory. The film got mixed to negative reviews citing the focus being split between fantasy, cop drama, and social commentary had hurt the film.
In a novelization a writer would have had more freedom to go deeper into this world. There could have been more backstory to the rich Elf city, more of a balance between the social classes of mythical animals and the overarching magic prophecy plot thread. Many aspects of the film that left viewers wanting more could have been explored and the potential to see this world in novel form would have been a delight and a natural transition as fantasy can quickly capture the imagination in the written medium.
Lastly, the film that would be improved ten fold had it had a novelization would be Colin Trevorrow's 2017 disaster, The Book of Henry. Yes, this is an odd choice. A drama about a boy trying to prevent his neighbor's abuse? Surely I must be mistaken, but after you watch this film you'll understand why a novelization would work wonders on such a story. Instead of expanding upon the world like in Bright, or delving into the themes of Chappie, The Book of Henry would be essentially fixed and more palatable had there been a novelization.
There are too many aspects of the film to list as to where it went wrong, but the biggest absurdity that the audience had to overcome was that this boy is super smart, literally taking care of his mother's bills each month, and the only thing he can come up with to help his neighbor was to kill her dad. Then along that journey he brainwashed his mother into thinking that had to happen, and even more of a mess unfolds. By having a novel adaptation to this mess of a film it could put forth a cohesive narrative and make sense of certain character actions. It could also handle the abuse much more tactfully and meaningfully than the disgusting way the film treats it. No matter what the novelization does it'll be five times better than what the film was able to achieve, and the worst part of all this is that there is a story in this movie worth telling...it just told the story in the worst way it could have.
So, while novelizations are not the biggest of deals these days, there is still value in having a novel adaptation of your favorite movies. Then how come we can't have novelizations to improve on mediocre, or just overall bad, movies? It'll at least craft an interesting conversation for cinephiles and if you did like a movie that nobody else did then these novelizations could have improved upon the story and thus enhanced your experience of it that much more. For now we can only dream, but maybe sometime in the near future we'll have novelizations that come out after the fact that deal with movies like these.
What are some of your favorite film novelizations? What bad film would you like to see adapted to a novel? Comment below!
