Decoding Hollywood Trend: Romance Movies from an Adaptation of Books
Back in the 1990s and even early 2000s romantic movies were mostly original. Meaning, there were actual script writers who wrote many scenarios just to make a movie out of them. However, if we analyze the trend of romantic movies for the last ten years, we can see that movies are coming more from an adaptation of books. So why are there so many romantic movies that are adaptations of books? Romantic movies adapted from books are more likely to succeed than original scenarios because the exposure of a complete love story will grab the audience’s attention and the positive review from those books will make the reader crave for something more realistic. Thus, creating a movie out of one will attract many viewers and create larger profits.
During this trade industry analysis, we will decode the real reason why there are less original romance movies and more adaptations of books. We will look at the money earned in romantic movies from an adaptation of books like The Twilight Saga, and the original romantic movie Music and Lyrics. We will also look at the people working behind the scenes and how that might impact the movie’s profit as a whole.
The Twilight Saga
Over the last five years, The Twilight Saga: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Part I and Breaking Dawn Part II, have made over $2,958,702,819 in combined profits between all five movies. In addition, The Twilight Saga has made an average of $591,740,563.8 for each film. Of course, The Twilight Saga was an adaptation from Stephenie Myers’s books with the exact same name.
So, let’s break this down to why The Twilight Saga was so immensely popular. The first movie of the series, Twilight, was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Twilight scored 49% in Rotten Tomatoes — which means the movie was given a “Rotten” seal from an American review aggregation website. The two people that should be given the most credit for the success of the Twilight series are to the original writer of the novel series (Stephenie Myers) and the director (Catherine Hardwicke). First and foremost, The Twilight Series wouldn’t even exist without the creative writing of Stephenie Myers. Even though many people would argue that Myers’s works are not meant to be considered quality writing, the most important point is the fact that Myers was creative enough to come up with such a captivating, unique love story between a human and a vampire. This unique love story is more than enough to create five different Hollywood movies out of it. With that being said, this love story wouldn’t be able to thrive in the box office without the creative work of Catherine Hardwicke. Hardwicke was able to put her artistic work into the writing of Myers and uses the raw material of the book and transforms it to life. As a result, the first movie of the series was a huge box office hit. The trick to this success? Like I said before, the combination of Myers’ creative writing that initially attracted local readers are now attracting the Hollywood industry and then attracting many movie lovers, which results in large amounts of profit for Hollywood and Myers herself.
Then, the second movie of The Twilight Saga: New Moon attracted a lot more viewers, thus causing the final movie profit to double compared to Twilight. Although New Moon takes home a lot more profit, the reviews went down drastically to 28% in Rotten Tomatoes; once again, another Twilight Saga movie was given the “Rotten” seal. In the next series: Eclipse, the take home profit stays the same, but the rating jumps up to 49% in Rotten Tomatoes. For the last two installments of the series, the profit stays the same in Breaking Dawn Part I with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 25%, and the profit increased by $107,543,964; in Breaking Dawn Part II the rating increased to 49%, but still gain a “Rotten” seal on Rotten Tomatoes. Over time, we can see that The Twilight Saga either gains viewers or stays consistent. However, the series itself never loses money, their budget is a lot smaller compared to the amount of ticket sold, thus making The Twilight Saga very profitable.
Since we’ve analyzed the numbers, let’s take a look at the director working on The Twilight Saga. After a little digging, I’ve found it astonishing how each movie of the series uses a different director, except the last two installments. Like mentioned previously, Twilight was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. New Moon was directed by Chris Weitz, Eclipse was directed by David Slade and the final two installments of the series: Breaking Dawn Part I and Breaking Dawn Part II was directed by Bill Condon. Between all the directors involved into the making of The Twilight Saga, three of them have directed other romantic movies that are adaptations. For instance, Catherine Hardwicke directed Red Riding Hood in 2011 starring Amanda Seyfried. In addition, Hardwicke added love interest into the movie starring Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez. Then, David Slade directed 30 Days of Night that was another book adaptation by Steve Niles. 30 Days of Night seems to be very similar to Twilight, since 30 Days of Night is just another vampire story. Bill Condon, in contrast, adapted a Broadway musical called Dreamgirls into a motion picture movie.
The directors of The Twilight Saga are important because they are the ones who make the visuals from the book come to life in movie screens. However, the distributer of the films is also another important role to the success of romance movies from book adaptations. Before Twilight, Summit Entertainment was nowhere near the top Hollywood studio. After the release of the first Twilight movie, Summit Entertainment climbed up to eighth place among other studios; which brings me to another point. During the Twilight era, Summit Entertainment decided to invest on another romance book adaptation: Letters to Juliet. Letters to Juliet earned a decent amount of money, but it is nothing like The Twilight Series. After the end of the Twilight Series, Summit Entertainment stopped making romance movie book adaptations. The company realized that if they invest something that doesn’t have a lot of content to work from, like Letters to Juliet, they won’t make that into a movie because Hollywood won’t be able to play around with the materials. Then, in 2012 Summit Entertainment merged with Lionsgate. Lionsgate bought Summit Entertainment for 412.5 million, but they continue to operate as a separate brand because of content agreements.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Pictures is a big distribution company. They’ve published a lot of big hits movies — including the Harry Potter series. However, we are going to focus on the romantic movies Warner Bros. has released over the last few years. After thorough research, it has been concluded that Warner Bros. Picture mainly produces romantic movies from book adaptation. Besides Music and Lyrics, Warner Bros. has only produced one other original romantic movie called Valentine’s Day. Those other book adaptations includes: Red Riding Hood, The Lucky One, Beautiful Creatures, The Great Gatsby, If I Stay, Me Before You, P.S. I Love You, and Winter’s Tale.
Music and Lyrics earned an exceptional profit of $145,896,422. Music and Lyrics was written and directed by Marc Lawrence. The movie itself racked 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is higher than the Twilight series. Marc Lawrence himself has written and directed many other successful romantic movies — those romantic movies include: Miss Congeniality (2000), Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005), Two Weeks Notice (2002), and Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009). Lawrence is also very consistent when picking out great actors to star in his romance movies — Lawrence has worked with Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, Miss Congeniality 2, and Two Weeks Notice. Lawrence has also worked with Hugh Grant in The Two Weeks Notice, Music and Lyrics, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, and The Rewrite — which says something about original romantic movies. Directors are going to pick out actors that have been successful in their roles in similar movies, instead of new actors that have very limited exposure in the genre.
Looking back, we can conclude that when comparing numbers between original romance movies to adaptation of books, the profit for each individual movie are around the same modest range. However, because of one mega hit success like Twilight, big publishing companies in Hollywood are more likely do more adaptations of books because of the long-term effects on profits. Meaning, if one romantic book adaptation is very successful, they are most likely going to make more movies from it.
Like I mentioned before, adaptation of books is very profitable because the descriptions used in the original book will make many readers crave something more visual. Then comes in big Hollywood productions: Summit Entertainment and Warner Bros. Those big film production studios will hire top directors and buy copyrights from the writer of the novel to create a movie out of the content from the books. In the result, most romance movies that comes from an adaptation of books are very profitable. Look at The Twilight Saga for example, the total number of profits would be $2,958,702,819. Why is that number so significant in this analysis? This number tells us so much about the Hollywood film industry. The Hollywood movie is ultimately a pure business. Companies are not going to invest in something if they can’t make a lot of money out of it. Thus, adaptation of books (in this case the romance genre) will create more money compared to original romance movies. When it comes to original romance movies, it is a one profit venture. When this original movie is out, the money earned for that movie is it. There is not going to be a sequel of that movie; it is a one-time deal. In addition, if you look at the chart, there have not been lot of original romantic movies over the last ten years. Also, there is not a lot of original romantic movies that makes decent profits other than Valentine’s Day and Music and Lyrics. However, if you look at original romantic movies on Rotten Tomatoes, the ratings are a lot higher than those of adaptation of books. So, if the quality of romance movies is better in original stories, why can’t Hollywood make more of them? Why is our generation so caught up with money to the point where they loose sight of what matters in life? Just like what Henry Ford says, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business”.
