The Cinematic Book Adaptation in an Era in Which People Don't Read

Back in 2022 Where the Crawdads Sing brought in $90 million domestically, and a little over half that internationally--which in the end actually allowed it to be one of the year's more profitable films. (If no billion-dollar blockbuster, it also did not have a billion-dollar blockbuster budget.) Still, one might have imagined it being a bigger hit given howpopular the book was, even with the critics less than enthusiastic about the movie. And I have wondered since (especially after the weak response to another film based on a hugely successful book, Killers of the Flower Moon), whether this is not in its way suggestive of the trend of things with regard to publishing--fewer people reading, with a reflection of that how even bestsellers not moving so many copies as before and meaning less even to the people who do read them, such that fewer of them will come out for the movie. Even just in this century movies based on the works of J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins and E.L. James made for some of its biggest cinematic hits--but from here on out success on that scale is probably going to be an increasing longshot for any book not already established as a multimedia franchise, one likely so established that way that their origin in a book is practically irrelevant to their pop cultural cachet, even when the franchise-runners spend a great deal of time reminding everyone about it (as they do with James Bond).