14 Great Movies That Cashed In On Best-Sellers

David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens in theaters on October 3rd, 2014. Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl – the book on which the feature film is based – was published just over two years ago on June 5th, 2012. That’s some pretty quick turnaround.

But then, this is nothing new for Hollywood. Ever since feature films have begun, filmmakers have been quick to cash in on brand new literary crazes, eager to snag a handily built-in audience. If a pop novel has even the slightest whiff of a cult forming around it, film studios have always been slyly attentive and sprightly about turning those books into screenplays, regardless of the book’s genre, demographic, or, lamentably, quality. Some pundits have mourned the dwindling readership of this grand nation of ours, but if Hollywood is any sort of reliable indicator, people are still eating up books with an unmatched voraciousness, and attending the film adaptations of said books in droves. How much money did The Hunger Games make again?

 

Related: Listen to Four Trent Reznor Tracks from ‘Gone Girl’

 

And while this ongoing novel-to-film trend has provided us with numerous bad movies, a quick look back reveals that some really great films – indeed some of the greatest films of all time – have been, essentially, quick exploitative reaches into the pockets of the literary audience. Let’s take a look at some of the films Gone Girl is trying to live up to.

 

Slideshow: 14 Great Movies That Cashed in on Recent Best-Sellers

 


Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.

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