2022's Where the Crawdads Sing at the Box Office

Delia Owens' novel Where the Crawdads Sing was a colossal bestseller, lasting for over three years on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. Predictably made into a film, that movie was released in the summer of 2022.

Compared with similarly successful bestsellers made into major movies--The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey--this adaptation’s run in theaters seemed relatively low profile, Crawdads, in what, a very few exceptions apart (Avatar 2, Top Gun 2) was a less than booming year, failed to crack the long-since inflated $100 million barrier and finished behind such "underperforming" films as Elvis, Nope and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore at the North American box office (while doing still less well internationally).

However, according to Deadline it actually proved to be one of the more profitable films of the year, earning nearly $200 million on an outlay of $123 million (only a fifth of which was spent on the actual production) for a 61 percent "cash-on-cash return."

In doing so Crawdads was that rarity of recent years, a film made for a relatively small amount of money that--even without being a horror film or an arty critic's darling that gets heavily promoted to a wider audience (the film seems to have been as disliked by critics as it was liked by its viewers)--managed to sell millions of tickets. The result is an undeniable hit on a smaller scale (making a little less than the ill-fated Fantastic Beasts 3, but costing only a small fraction of what that movie did, so that it came out far ahead by this metric).

All the same, successful as the film was--and important the book's built-in audience was to making it a success--I find myself wondering if the modest scale of that success is not in its way suggestive of books mattering less in contemporary culture than they did just a short time earlier.