Everyone knows Hollywood loves a book adaptation. As opposed to other film and television projects, these come with an established fanbase, meaning a built-in audience for the project that is likely to boost its chances of success. From The Hunger Games and Harry Potter to The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars, some of the industry’s most enduring franchises originated as book series.
But, what most readers are probably unaware of, is that some of these books were written with their adaptations already in mind — including a few of those mentioned above.
Two production companies dominating the YA space have developed models where they shepherd both the publishing of a book and the development of its corresponding film or television show adaptation at the same time. While traditional publishers must take a book to market, these studios retain the film or TV rights to eventually adapt the book.
Alloy Entertainment, a Warner Bros. Discovery company, and Temple Hill Entertainment sport publishing divisions that pair writers with their ideas, which can range from a seed to a full-fledged pitch, to develop a book with the intention of moving forward with some sort of adaptation in addition to publication. In doing so, they get the best of both worlds: an original story that can reach the tappable and eager demo of young adult readers and a screen offering that gets studio sign-off given its attachment to established IP.
Two splashy summer films that came to fruition through this collaborative process for the 2006-founded Temple Hill, whose publishing division started in 2017, are My Oxford Year and The Map That Leads to You, which released on Netflix Aug. 1 and Prime Video Aug. 20, respectively.
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Both films arrived in their first iterations as books, with My Oxford Year written by popular audiobook narrator, author and Oxford graduate Julia Whelan. Whelan based her book on the original screenplay by Allison Burnett, and both were expanded upon to become the Netflix film directed by Iain Morris and starring Sofia Carson and Corey Mylchreest. The Map That Leads To You was first a book written by J.P. Monninger, and now it’s also the Prime Video movie, starring Madelyn Cline and KJ Apa and directed by Lasse Hallström.
“A lot of these ideas will start as simple as like, ‘Oh, we should do a love story about the summer after you graduate college and backpacking through Europe, and you fall in love, and you’re torn between wanting to stay on that journey and go home to your job,’” Temple Hill’s Wyck Godfrey, who shepherds many of these adaptations alongside his producing partner Marty Bowen, told Deadline. “Marty and I, when we when we were growing up, there was a movie called Oxford Blues starring Rob Lowe, and we were like, ‘Oh my god, Oxford Blues. We should do a love story set at Oxford.’ Instead of a guy, it’s a girl, and that’s how it all starts, basically, usually at lunches where we’re just shooting the sh*t about ideas.”
Bowen says he quickly got behind both of these stories, which do have some plot overlap but focus on different versions of life abroad, because he felt they could tap into readers’ personal experiences to attract them to each project. For both Les Morgenstein of Alloy Entertainment and Temple Hill’s Bowen and Godfrey, it’s less about which comes first and more about the side-by-side development of an idea they think will hook audiences.
“Everything is slightly personal, right? You go through your journeys, and you add that to it, whether it’s a film or a book. I went to Oxford, and I had seen Love Story, and felt like there was a better version of what that could be with a more desirable backdrop, a more fish-out-of-water-story version of it, and there are similarities to Love Story,” Bowen said. “Map That Leads To You, if you were to have an extension of the time you spend overseas at a school, you inevitably have Americans that go to Europe to backpack. That is also a wish fulfillment thing, where you really get to be out on in the world on your own. I was fortunate to have both of those experiences. I was not, however, a woman, so that’s where they started, but what ends up happening, inevitably is that everybody brings something to the table, and it evolves into something completely different, or significantly different, I should say, than what the original intention was.”
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Once Bowen and Godfrey have some ideas rattling around, Temple Hill’s Head of Publishing, Petersen Harris, who has background as a film executive, then identifies which pitches might do well as books. He and his team search for authors with a style that is suited for the story and works with them on the book proposals. With the aim of filling a gap for stories missing from the marketplace, which he admits is “easier said than done” Harris aims for “trend-setting rather than trend-following.”
“I would say there’s a part of us that’s trying to recognize what we can sell, so that we make sure that we have a high success ratio. But at the same time, you want to be predictive of the zeitgeist as well. So if you look back, those books are pretty old now, right? Romance is so mainstream now, but when we published Map as basically a new adult novel starring a 19-year-old girl, none of those books were really being published as much as they are now,” Harris told Deadline. “And when it comes to Oxford, being a romance that starts like a party and then ends with heavier issues, sure, that’s being asked for now on a very regular basis. But again, that was published [seven] years ago. There’s a balance of making sure that we succeed selling our books to publishers and, ultimately, studios, but we also want to be anticipatory of what does the audience want that we’re not getting right now.”
Each project reaches completion through a different recipe of brainstorming, attaching writers and other collaboration in addition to timeline of production, which can take longer on the film side of things. The added hope of a future adaptation makes the idea more appealing to publishers.
“They know that we are going to do whatever it takes to deliver creatively on the promise because we’ve been doing it for a very long time, and we’re established. We’re not by any means fly by night. We’re going to see it through. We’re going to make it as good as possible. We’re going to work with the writers to make sure their vision comes to fruition. We have an incredible track record in publishing. So we believe, and I think they believe, that we just have a nose for commercial ideas and identifying the talented writers to deliver them,” Morgenstein told Deadline.
All this might sound quite simple, but it’s still show business. These adaptations take a bit of time and conviction to get across the finish line. On the YA side of things, Alloy works with the writer and eventual author to develop a partial manuscript that loosely comprises the first act of the book. The partial manuscript is then marketed to publishers by Alloy, who have connections within’ that world. For adult projects, Alloy works with the writer to develop a full manuscript, and Morgenstein finds this step a way of shortening the process. Selling off a partial manuscript can prolong the timeline for the project because of all of the developmental work still to do. Alloy then works alongside publishers like a studio would a platform or network in TV.
“We are newer to the adult business. We’re building those relationships. We are growing our success, and we’re doing quite well. We’ve sold a lot of books. We’ve had a bunch of best sellers, but we’re not the big fish in the little pond like we are in YA, so it takes a different form,” Morgenstein said. “Initially, we questioned, ‘Well, if we’re developing full manuscripts, is this just going to be an incredibly slow business?’ But we’re finding that’s not the case because it’s so close to being finished. When we sell it to a publisher, typically, they’re buying it because they love it, and they come back and say, ‘Well, we have a couple notes’ which can be addressed with the writers pretty quickly.”
After that, all that’s left is to hope the story pops off the way that they anticipated.
“There is a hope that there’ll be a show, there’ll be a movie in two years or three years. We’re always very careful to say to our publishers, ‘That’s our aspiration. We’re in that business…We’ve made 10 movies in the past, however many years, [but] no promises.’ They’re really different businesses,” Morgenstein said. “When we sell a book, the book is going to be published. There have been a few cases over the years where something has happened and they haven’t been. When we sell development, one in however many projects are actually getting made. It could happen quickly. It could take forever.”
As mentioned, some of the most enduring young adult franchises have been developed this way. For example, a more targeted pitch for Alloy was that of the Pretty Little Liars series, which was created by I. Marlene King and aired on Freeform for the majority of the 2010s. The original idea was to figure out a way to develop a Desperate Housewives-esque show for teenagers. Alloy has partnered with author Sara Shepherd on several books since.
In that case, the books arrived before the show took off. Other TV franchises created through this model include The 100, which aired on the CW, and Netflix’s You. The 100 took on different lives in book versus show form because the book proposal — for four books — and the show pitch to the CW were sold around the same time. The show writers room and the author of the books wrote at different paces. You started out sharing DNA with Caroline Kepnes’ novel because the novel had been published first.
Alloy launched in 2007 with the CW’s Gossip Girl, and the company also cut its teeth on films like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants franchise that were made in conjunction with Ann Brashares’ books. They’re also responsible for Everything Everything (2016) and The Sun Is Also A Star (2019), which correspond to young adult novels written by Nicola Yoon. The opportunity is always there for authors and film or tv writers to collaborate on their respective projects, with Yoon providing input when the movie adaptations of her books were being made. Some writers prefer to stick to their lanes.
Another Alloy film project that came out first in book form, but inspired by a script, and then to roaring viewership stats was the Netflix adaptation in 2022 was Purple Hearts, starring Sofia Carson alongside Nicholas Galitzine. The project first came across Alloy’s desk 19 years ago, Morgenstein said, thanks to an idea from the company’s then-TV chief Bob Levy.
“I don’t know if he’d read an article or seen something on TV about contract military marriages, where soldiers marry civilians for benefits and increased pay, and the civilian gets all the military benefits, including healthcare. And he’s like, ‘I think this is fascinating.’ We were both fans of the movie Love Story, and we thought, ‘Okay, this could be a way to modernize that.’ It felt very topical at the time. Obama was president and healthcare was really front of mind,” Morgenstein explained. “So we hired Kyle Jarrow, who was the original screenwriter, to write the script, and we were kind of newbie movie producers at the time. We hadn’t done a ton. We developed the script. We were happy with it. We took it to market, and it didn’t sell. So we’re like, ‘We still love this thing. Let’s do a book.’ So we hired a writer. We developed the book. We sold the book to Simon and Schuster. They published it.”
Though the film may have taken 17 years to make, it was not only the Netflix numbers that made it worth it, but the cultural conversation around the project and the soundtrack’s permeation into radio airwaves. Morgenstein said he knew they’d pierced the zeitgeist when he heard one of the film’s hit songs while walking through the Macy’s at the Sherman Oaks Westfield Mall in Los Angeles, California.
RELATED: Nicholas Galitzine Joins Alloy Entertainment’s Sofia Carson ‘Purple Hearts’ Pic With Netflix Taking Global Rights
In addition to leveraging the book’s audience, there was also the added benefit of casting someone like Carson, who also came with a built-in fanbase of her own. Morgenstein said he first worked with Carson on the pilot for Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists and, soon after, director Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum called the exec up to see how they might be able to team with the Descendants star again.
“Typically, we’d sell it as a studio movie, and Netflix would be the studio and we’d produce it. In this case, we were the studio and Netflix was the distributor,” Morgenstein added. “So that project required me to wear two hats [as] creative producer and the studio, but it was like a scrappy, scrappy movie, and I think we well exceeded the expectations of the budget.”
The process was not unlike that of two projects that Netflix novelized, but novelization is the key word here, where the scripts were the solid first iteration of the story for the Millie Bobby Brown-starring film Damsel and Bridgerton spinoff series Queen Charlotte, both of which were adapted into books. These works saw major success in the streaming landscape as well with Damsel notching over 143 million views globally after landing on the streamer March 8, 2024. Queen Charlotte has generated nearly 130M global views since it launched, becoming one of Netflix’s most popular TV shows of all time remaining on their list from July 23, 2023 to January 28, 2024.
For Temple Hill, especially, this process is completely ingrained into the company’s business model. As Godfrey put it, “Everything we do, we intend to turn into a movie or a TV series.”
“From a process standpoint, they do always start from a place of, we believe that would make a great movie, or we believe that would make a great TV series, and if we feel like there’s not only a movie to be made, but also we should do the book too,” he added. “That’s typically how every book that we do at Temple Hill originates. We’re not a publishing company first who then, if we have a couple of good books, we’ll turn them into movies.”
Tackling the adaptation process from both sides benefits each half of the project, especially if the book is already published before assets for the screen adaptation hit the web. Particularly, the bread crumbing of the on-screen version of the story impacts book sales in what Temple Hill’s Harris calls “the trailer bump.”
“The two sides of the business really help one another in that way, and it’s pretty unique. We are a legit book company and we’re a legit film and TV company,” Morgenstein said. “When something starts to happen [in development], on the book side, it gives us a big second bite at the apple, regardless of whether or not that book worked the first time around. There’s a second opportunity for the publisher to take it to market and resell it.”
For example, Alloy was also behind The Vampire Diaries, a book series that was first published in the ’90s. After Twilight took off, Alloy republished the books and took a pitch to the CW to turn the story into the beloved show starring Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley, Ian Somerhalder and more.
RELATED: Julie Plec Reflects On 15 Years Of ‘The Vampire Diaries’ & Teases Upcoming YA Mystery Series ‘We Were Liars’
As promotion started ahead of release for both My Oxford Year and The Map That Leads To You, it prompted an uptick in sales of those books. With another Temple Hill conjunction project, Clown in a Cornfield, whose adaptation was developed for AMC+, the film’s release brought about an influx of sales across Adam Cesare’s first three books (a fourth is on the way), bringing the total to a quarter of a million copies.
While this model is certainly innovative, especially at a time where major franchise IP is all that studios and streamers seem to be interested in, Godfrey and Bowen spotted this symbiotic trend many moons ago thanks to their roots in YA and dystopian book adaptations before beginning their publishing division.
The pair had a hand in hit films like Twilight, Maze Runner and The Fault in Our Stars, all of which Godfrey said correlated to a rise in book sales by “multiple hundreds percent” upon getting their green light.
“Every publisher knows that a good film adaptation of a book sells an extraordinary amount of books,” Godfrey said. Case in point: Though there has yet to be a trailer for Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, he says “the book sales have spiked back up to the best seller list, because everyone starts to anticipate the movie, and they’re like, ‘Wait, I want to read the book before the movie comes out.’”
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“I do think that the publishers look at the films we’ve done that have been based on books and see the spike in sales, in success, and it makes it a little bit easier to get them to buy into a book that we’re saying ‘We’re making the movie,’” he continued. “We’ve had times where we’ve been developing the script as we’re developing the book. We’re not waiting for the book to become a success before we move forward [with] a movie.”
Temple Hill was also behind YA hit film adaptations like Paper Towns, Love, Simon and, more recently, the HBO Max original movie based on John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down. Future external projects include People We Meet on Vacation and as well as the adaptation of Tomi Adayeme’s Children of Blood and Bone. Upcoming in-house projects include military thriller The Fort (marketed as a cross between A Few Good Men and Silence of the Lambs) set up as a book with Simon and Schuster as well as in development with Lionsgate Television. There’s also a motion picture in the works with Paramount based on Bob Proehl’s Dragon Day, the audiobook of which is narrated Haley Atwell, Michael Chiklis, Aldis Hodge, Greta Lee, Jimmi Simpson and more. Temple Hill also had The Summer I Turned Pretty star Christopher Briney read the audiobook version of its book Influencer alongside The Last of Us star Isabela Merced and Brittany Pressley.
Alloy has projects like the film Getting Rid of Matthew, an adaptation of Christina Lauren’s In A Holidaze from Tiffany Paulsen and Prime Video series The Davenports in the works.
As both companies move forward, they hope to continue to develop these strong, independent franchises while keeping in mind their target audiences. While Alloy made its foundation in YA, it continues to explore concepts with aged-up characters and what might trend with audiences.
“It’s a legacy of creating entertainment brands that have been really enduring and impactful. We don’t talk a lot about IP. Obviously, we are creating IP,” Morgenstein said. “It’s important to us that our properties and success appeal to broad audiences. Almost everything we do has that hook. That’s what elevates these properties and takes them from being books or shows to being franchises. We’re not shifting the business our audience. Our business was built around Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and Vampire Diaries. They all were female skewing, and while they had teen characters, those shows were watched by an older audience. We are targeting that audience. We’re just doing it with books and shows and movies that have older protagonists and that [are] reflective of the marketplace.”
Temple Hill’s Harris hopes to do more in the audiobook space like with Dragon Day, and he mentioned an idea similar to Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & the Six television series based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book. He also drew the connection between past Young Adult readers finding New Adult and Adult works from Temple Hill as they grow older.
“The production level of a great audio book can bring the written narrative to life in a way that makes it easier to imagine the translation to cinema. It’s been a very cool process, and we want to do more in this space,” he told Deadline. “It always comes down to quality of execution and emotional resonance, no matter what genre we’re exploring. One idea we’ve been discussing is a book set in the music world, in which we would create a band & write songs that would originate in the book and then get performed in the adaptation.”
Bowen and Godfrey are more of the mindset to “grasp things at the time you’re interested in them,” which Godfrey traces from his start with science fiction and action to middle grade to young adult.
“We’re, as a company, voracious about telling stories. So many people pat themselves on the backs in terms of, ‘Hey, I got to make this movie, and it did well…’” Bowen said. “I always think about all of the stories I’m desperate to tell, and you can never tell all of them. [The] great thing about being in the publishing business is we get to tell exponentially more stories. That feels good.”
Katie Campione contributed to this report.