A recent thread on J.K. Rowling made me wonder which author has had their books go on to make the most successful movies. I’m not talking money for the author him of herself - they may have sold the rights for pennies. I’m just talking about the total box office from the movies based on their books.
A few possibilties:
J.K. Rowling - The Harry Potter movies have all been successful.
J.R.R. Tolkein - So were the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Plus there must have been something from the earlier Hobbit movies.
Ian Fleming - All of the early Bond movies
Bram Stoker - Probably not. It depends on whether you credit every Dracula movie to his original book. Plus there hasn’t been any huge Dracula blockbusters.
Tom Clancy - The Jack Ryan movies.
Mario Puzo - The Godfather plus maybe the two sequels depending on how you divide up the credit.
Margaret Mitchell - If adjusted for inflation.
Bob Kane and Bill Finger - Why not? There have been several big Batman movies.
This brings up another question. All of those, as I understand it (I never read the books, myself) were extremely heavily altered for the film, to the point where you can recognize the original, but only barely. Are these really considered to be the author’s film. How far can you take them before it’s meaningless?
The only other one that looks like it might break a billion: Michael Crichton. The Jurassic Park movies tally $767M, and he also wrote Twister ($242M), though that wasn’t an adaptation from a novel.
So it’s not just me then. I was thinking “what was Disclosure, again? guess I better look it up too…” and was surprised. I still don’t really remember that movie, but the cover looks familiar.
Crichton breaks $1B Domestically by a wide margin. Andromeda Strain ($12M), *Disclosure *($80M), *Sphere *($37M), Rising Sun ($63M), 13th Warrior ($85M), *Timeline *($20M), *Congo *($81M).
Additionally, Next and Pirate Latitudes are scheduled to be adapted into movies in the near future and I’d be surprised if his other novels that haven’t been sold yet don’t end up on the big screen before too long. Considering Speilberg is a fan of his and is planning on doing Pirate Latitudes him getting another several hundred million under his belt seems likely. If director/producers of similar talent and reputation latch onto his other works $2B isn’t out of the question.
Incidentally, how much credit does Ian Fleming get for the Bond franchise? Most of the movies have nothing to do with anything he wrote, and even the ones that are based on his novels were changed dramatically in both plot, mood and characterization.
ETA: Rats. Beaten to the punch while I did my research. Curse you all!
If you decided to use adjusted numbers I think he’d end up at the top. The Shining for example would be well over $110M in today’s dollars as opposed to the $44M it took in in 1980. Stand By Me, Carrie, Misery, Pet Semetary and *The Running Man * would all probably be poking the $100M mark adjusted as well.
Only Bond and The Godfather movies reach back far enough to really grow substantially, and Puzo would still not be able to reach $1B. Bond would be well ahead based on adjusted numbers since the Bond movies have always been big sellers and span back decades but I’m not sure I credit Fleming with any of the newer ones.
Gone With The Wind adjusted is at $1.451B so that’s probably the mark to beat other than Harry Potter.
I thought of another one: Richard Matheson. His big hit would be I Am Legend (along with the two previous adaptations). But his books were also the basis for What Dreams May Come, Stir of Echoes, Somewhere in Time, The Legend of Hell House, It’s Alive,, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Jules Verne has to be incredibly profitable – not because of blockbuster movies (although Disney’s 20,000 Leagues and Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Dayswould probably qualify), but simply because there were so many film versions in countries all over the world, essentially since the beginning of cinema. I understand that Russian versions of In Search of the Castaways were immensely popular, even though, as far as I know, they’ve never been shown in the US.
The IMDb lists 134 adaptations of his works, all but about 20 of them made since 1950: