There’s a pretty big business hiding behind the release of popular movie releases. This is the business of novelization, where authors write entire books adapted from movies in much the same way that some of our favorite movies were adapted from classic literature. The only problem is: very few people actually have any desire to read an entire book based on a movie that they’ve seen.
While it is not known whether an actual novelization will be written for the new biggest movie ever to be made, Avatar, but James Cameron has other plans for a book. The director has decided that an entire prequel story novel will be written, and instead of leaving it in the hands of others, Cameron is going to take care of it himself.
Avatar producer Jon Landau talked about the plan to have Cameron write the whole thing:
Jim is going to write a novel himself.
Not a novelization — and there is a distinction. A novelization basically retells the story of the movie. Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things.
It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake’s brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that.
And what about the fact that Cameron has no experience in writing novels?
I don’t think Jim has ever written a novel before, but his first step of writing a script is often in a novella format. So this is just expanding that, and I think that he’ll be very adept at it.
This is all being done so that when an Avatar sequel is made, fans of the first film can read this prequel and learn all about the characters and their backstories.
No set release date is scheduled yet, but the hopes are that it will finished and ready to go by the end of the year.
[Source: MTV]
