8 Movies You Didn’t Know Were Based on Books

But not always. Fairly or not, it’s not uncommon for a film to overshadow its literary parent—Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was an incredibly popular book that remains a (problematic) classic, but even among readers I suspect that you’d find far more people who’ve seen the movie than who’ve read the book (for the record: I have a copy, and I’ll get to it someday I swear). Same with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or Robert Bloch’s Psycho. Is the book or movie of Stephen King’s The Shining superior? It’s not always clear-cut. The latter part of 2016 sees several major works making the treacherous journey from page to screen: The Girl on the Train, A Monster Calls, and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children among many others. Some of the films will crash, some will equal the success of the book, and a special one or two might even eclipse the source material. Here are a few films that you might have forgotten were based on novels:

The Princess Bride
The quirky, weird, funny, and romantic movie from 1987 is so beloved (deservedly so) that it’s easy to forget that it was based on a 1973 novel from William Goldman, who also wrote the film’s screenplay. It would be easy to assume that the film’s wackier bits sprung from the talented comedic cast and director Rob Reiner. If anything, though, the book is even more gloriously strange than the movie. The central conceit is that the book itself is an abridged version (“the good parts”) of an older text by the fictional S. Morgenstern, and promises additional scenes when you write to the publisher. Another very different novel of Goldman’s was also made into a movie: the 1974’s Nazi dentist conspiracy thriller Marathon Man.

Die Hard
Action movies are frequently structured around visual set-pieces, so it’s easy to forget that some of the greats have been based on novels. Crime novelist Roderick Thorpe had several run-ins with Hollywood, not the least of which was the blockbuster adaption of his 1979 thriller Nothing Lasts Forever as the John McTiernan directed/Bruce Willis starring Die Hard, a film which has spurred four sequels to date. But there’s more: Thorpe’s book, starring hard-bitten retired police detective Joe Leland (John McClane in the movie), was a sequel to his 1966 book The Detective, which was itself made into a 1968 movie starring Frank Sinatra. Meaning that Bruce Willis and Frank Sinatra played, essentially, the same character twenty years apart.

First Blood
Even though the first movie in the series has a bit more weight than the even bloodier sequels, we tend not to think of Rambo as having literary antecedents. This is another case of an action film—this one about a traumatized Vietnam vet who runs afoul of a corrupt small-town sheriff—springing from the page. The movie is largely faithful to the David Morrell’s novel, with similar levels of violence masking themes of our treatment of veterans. Following the novel, John Rambo’s exploits were captured entirely on film, though Morrell himself wrote novelizations of the first two sequels.

Planet of the Apes
Pierre Boulle was a prolific author of “serious” novels whose foray into satirical science fiction became his most enduring work, even if the eight (and counting) films derived from 1963’s La Planète des Singes (more correctly translated as “Monkey Planet”) have overtaken the source material in the popular imagination. Similar in tone, the book and the movie part ways in the presentation of the Ape’s world as a more direct parallel to our own, with recognizable technology rather than the budget-saving primitive villages of the movie. There’s also a twist ending of the type that will be familiar to fans of the movies, though it’s goes in a very different direction. All the more reason to read the book.

The Graduate
Writer Charles Webb has had something of a fraught relationship with Ben, Elaine, and Mrs. Robinson. Having sold the rights to his 1963 debut novel for a one-time payment, he received little by way of money or credit for Mike Nichols’ classic coming-of-age story about plastics and cougars. Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross, and Buck Henry are names frequently associated with the film, less so Webb. Nevertheless, he wrote a sequel a few years ago, Home School, about Ben and Elaine’s challenges with the American educational system.

Snowpiercer
This particular adaption was long in coming: the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette came out in 1982, while the South Korean/Czech co-production (with several American, English, and Scottish stars) came out to much acclaim just a couple of years ago. Given the film’s wonderfully bizarre and action-filled story about a train carrying the last remnants of humanity in a climate-apocalypse future, it’s probably not entirely shocking that this was a comic book first, but the international sensibilities of the movie make it play very different from something like the latest Captain America movie. Keep in mind that there are a lot of movies that you’ve seen based on graphic novels, and they’re not all superhero films, nor even science fiction (Ghost World or Road to Perdition, for example).

Pitch Perfect
Just this past year, Michael Lewis’ 2010 non-fiction bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine was made into an unlikely drama with an all-star cast and heavily satirical overtones. It was even nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It wasn’t the first time that a non-fiction work was translated into a successful film. Another great example is 2012’s catty musical comedy Pitch Perfect, which was based on Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory, a book from GQ editor Mickey Rapkin who spent almost a year covering competitive a cappella in three colleges. A couple of the figures in the book were brought onto the movie to help with the music, so the linkages between the popular film and the book go beyond the premise and title.

Bambi
Austrian author Felix Salten’s 1923 work Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde, was incredibly popular in its time, even before becoming the basis of Walt Disney’s 1942 masterwork. The written work had a tremendous resonance well into the 1940s as Salten, a popular figure who happened to be a Jew, was forced to flee his native country for Switzerland. The environmental themes remained memorable, but the Nazi Party felt that the work’s essential humanity (in a book about deer, no less) made it an overly potent allegory, even though it was more than a decade old. In 1936 the book was banned and burned. Though the movie may have overshadowed the book, Salten managed to scare the Nazis by pouring his heart out onto the page. That’s one helluva legacy.
What’s your favorite movie made from a book?