Among all the TV shows and movies we watched in 2024, there was particular interest in book-to-screen adaptations, including on popular streaming sites like Netflix. We all got emotional watching the new One Day limited series, while the Bridgerton love continued with the “Polin” romance, and Andrew Scott and Dakota Fanning drew us into the crime drama of Ripley.
The trend of popular books being adapted for screen will continue into 2025, with several highly-anticipated projects landing on Netflix next year. This includes XO, Kitty and The Night Agent both returning for their second seasons, with You coming back for its fifth and final season, and Sweet Magnolias Season 4 will be released on the streaming platform as well.
But before we say hello to more book-to-screen adaptations, Indigo looked exactly how much of an impact these adaptations had on book sales in Canada, revealing the percentage increase month-over-month in total sales across Canada after popular shows and movies were released on Netflix.
Seeing this renewed interest in their books, famed authors, including “One Day” writer David Nicholls and “Leave the World Behind” writer Rumaan Alam, were not only pleased with the Netflix adaptations of their work, but thrilled by the positive response from new fans, and fans who read their novels first.
“It’s been amazing and entirely unexpected,” Nicholls told Yahoo Canada about all the fandom around the release of the One Day Netflix series. “To be watched by so many younger readers, especially, has been an absolute delight and surprise.”
“It’s very much a kind of ’80s, ’90s, 2000 story. So you never know how people are going to respond, but I’m so pleased that … people my own age and viewers and readers much younger have loved the story, and loved Emma and Dexter. … It’s a very emotional story. For a large period of time it’s very much a romantic comedy, and then it becomes something else, and people seem to really respond to that and to be taken by surprise, so that, for an author, is a great unexpected pleasure to see the story work in another medium like that.”
“One Day” was previously adapted for the 2011 movie of the same name, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, but Nicholls highlighted that adding a series into the mix is particularly reflective of the experience of reading a novel.
“I guess a streaming drama series is the closest you get to finding a structural version of the experience of reading a novel,” Nicholls said. “The idea of instalments and hooks, and coming back for one more episode, that seems to me to be quite close to the experience of reading a book.”
While the author stressed that the show’s creator, Nicole Taylor, stayed true to the book, he also appreciated how decisions were made to make some moments of the story less “dated” for its new screen audience.
“She stayed very, very faithful to the book, and at the same time just made subtle changes and shifts of emphasis that really, really brought out the tenderness of the story,” Nicholls said. “I think it’s a very touching, emotional version of the book.”
“She stripped away a lot of the kind of satire and stuff that felt a bit dated, and made Emma and Dexter really lovable and relatable.”
For Alam, whose novel “Leave the World Behind” became a particularly talked about film after its Netflix release in December 2023, starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and Myha’la, the author was pleased to see the renewed enthusiasm around his book.
“I’m obviously biased, but I think it’s an amazing movie and I’m so happy to see how many other people agree,” a statement from Alam to Yahoo Canada reads.
“And naturally, I’m delighted by anything—an Instagram post, an enthusiastic review, a librarian’s recommendation—that brings a reader to my work, so I’m honoured when fans of the film pick up the book that it’s based on.”
The author also highlighted that the screenplay by Sam Esmail really finds that “delicate balance” required in an adaptation of any work, “preserving the essence of the original while understanding the demands of a whole other form.”
“I think Sam’s screenplay accomplishes this beautifully, and I now appreciate in a way I’m not sure it occurred to me prior that filmmakers have access to a whole suite of tools—not just dialogue and performance but also music and sound, set design and props, and so on,” Alam stated. “I think a successful adaptation isn’t about faithfully rendering words from the book for the actors to speak, but using those aforementioned tools to conjure the atmosphere of the source material.”
Alam also identified that he really did have trust in everyone involved as “Leave the World Behind” moved beyond its written form to the screen.
“That trust makes everything about the job simpler, and it was something I felt with Sam Esmail … right off the bat,” Alam stated. “It’s not just about the fact that he’s got a long record of making beautiful work or that he had a vision for the adaptation that was exciting; it was really about this feeling I had that he was smart, and engaged, and shared my interests and concerns as a fellow artist. It was just a feeling, but that’s what trust is, I suppose.”
“The first half an hour of Sam’s film, I was in absolute shock, seeing people and scenarios from my imagination take concrete form. Then the movie worked its magic on me, and I watched it as any audience member would: riveted, afraid, even amused. I was and remain flattered and moved by Sam’s interpretation of my work.”
