e-book to movie ?

Caitlin Black

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I was curious. Have any e-books become movies yet?

I don't mean Indie films with low budgets and hardly any distribution. It doesn't have to be Hollywood, but anything with a decent budget and high distribution.

Thanks in advance for any insights. :)
 

gothicangel

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I was curious. Have any e-books become movies yet?

I don't mean Indie films with low budgets and hardly any distribution. It doesn't have to be Hollywood, but anything with a decent budget and high distribution.

Thanks in advance for any insights. :)

What's wrong with indie films? Some have good distribution by linking up with companies like Universal.
 

Caitlin Black

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Well, I did not know that. I assumed all Indie films were pretty much local successes, but with no real global penetration.

So mayhaps I should revise my query? If there's significant distribution, then I want to know.

:)
 

Caitlin Black

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(Why I want major distribution as a factor in this is simply that I want to know how much clout e-books have in getting "big" movies made, movies that a lot of people will hear about, as yet, compared to how all of the book-to-movie situations I've heard of have been print books.)
 

Terie

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You seem to be missing the fact that an e-book is just a container. Many (probably most) current releases of books by the major publishers are coming out as both print and e-books. Publishers are spending great wodges of money getting out their backlists in e-book format.

As just one simple example, The Da Vinci Code is both an e-book and a movie. Ditto Lord of the Rings

A book's format is irrelevant to whether it gets picked up to be made into a motion picture.
 

gothicangel

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I agree with Terie, an ebook is just the way a novel is sold. If a story was good enough to attract the attention of a producer/director.

Kevin MacDonald [film director] first came across the book The Last King of Scotland in manuscript form when he was working for Faber and Faber.
 

Mac H.

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'Julie & Julia' was a big, well distributed, movie based on /adapted from a blog.

A blog is the ultimate in e-publishing.

Mac
 

JSSchley

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Are you referring to self-published ebooks?

This. ebooks are just a format for media consumption. Do you mean books that are only published in electronic format? Self-published ebooks?

THE HELP is coming out soon. I'm rereading that as an ebook right now.
I bought CHARLIE ST. CLOUD in Borders' $5 ebook sale in January, after the movie was released.
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS is also on my ereader. I hear that one is a pretty popular movie, too.
 

Caitlin Black

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Okay, I need to clarify.

My curiosity (for that's all it was) was about e-book ONLY books (ie. not famous books re-released as e-books, or double releases as print and e) breaking into the high-paying, highly-noticed movie sector.

I also didn't mean to disparage Indie films. It didn't factor into what my curiosity was about, and that's all. I think some really great movies are released as Indie films for one reason or another. I also didn't mean to imply that you have to go the traditional movie route to be successful, or "good".

All that said, my curiosity was about e-book ONLY releases, and big budget, high distribution movies being made of them.

Again, I didn't mean to disparage anything that falls outside the realm of my parameters.

(And I think self-published e-books count too, and would be all the more impressive to be turned into a big budget movie.)

Basically I was curious as to whether a movie were made of an e-book-only release, and somewhat as to whether or not it was then turned into a print book.

This was my (evidently) clumsy way of trying to figure out what status e-publishing has in the wider world - whether print books will automatically be insinuated into any big success, or whether the world is really turning technological and it'd be perfectly acceptable to keep it as just an e-book, and still get huge sales.

I probably could've approached this question in a much easier, less clumsy way.

Eh, live and learn.

Thanks. :)
 

Terie

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Thanks for the clarification.

Since the e-book explosion is only seven months old, I'd say it's too soon to tell. Yes, e-books have been around for decades, but it's only been since Nov 2010 that they really started to get....attention, for lack of a better word.

That's way too soon for anything more than options to have been bought, and news of that is seldom made public; getting something into actual development takes much longer, and even longer to hit the screen.

I'd bet that some film options have been bought, but it'll be awhile yet before any of that gets all the way to the screen, especially since the vast majority of books on which film options are sold never get past that.
 

Caitlin Black

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Okay, thanks. :)

(I actually thought the e-book explosion happened about 18-24 months ago... Shows what I know. I'm not big on e-books - not to say I don't like them, just that I know bugger all about them.)

:)
 

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My self-pubbed novel, Pirates of the Carribean 4: On Stranger Tides, was just recently turned into a film starring Johnny Depp.

Oh. Wait. No.

I'd second the comment on Julie and Julia - that's a blog turned into a film - and there are probably more self-published novels to movies on the way, but I imagine this is extraordinarily rare and will remain so into the forseeable future.

Now back to work on my next self-pubbed book, Transformers 4.
 

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I don't think so, but to be honest the time lines are wrong. Sooner or later Locke is going to have one of his books turned into a big movie. I think that's inevitable.