Biggest movies of 2009 - Book adaptations

Adapting movies from books has been a trend in film publishing and production for a long long time. However, recent technological advancements such as cutting-edge CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) have allowed film-makers to bring book/comic adaptations to a whole new level. 

An article from The Australian looked at the most promising movies of 2009, and surprisingly, four out of the top ten movies are novel/comic book adaptations. These movies include Dan Brown's bestselling novel Angels and Demons, Marvel Comics' X-men, and the top spot taken by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. 

Apart from stunning CGI and special effects, what could be the reason why this genre of films are gaining such popularity? 

Die-hard fans who have read the novels and comic books would have already known their storylines. The notorious reputation of book adaptations for cutting out many scenes from the original plot in the novel doesn't help either. 

But several things comic books and novels do not possess are vivid, real-life images and suspenseful action/fighting scenes. When combined with special effects enabled by modern technology, a book adaptation film guarantees even the most knowledgeable of fans a bunch of surprises and a new experience with the characters in the original books. 

These films show us how the characters and settings actually look like. It captures the moving details of Wolverine's claws, the landscape of Hogwarts school, and other details which were helplessly left out in the books. 

This is because images have other effects that are different from text, effectively assisting a viewer's perception at aesthetic and imaginative levels (Walsh 2003). Schriver (2003) supports this statement by saying that images should be used to assist words in providing a clearer picture.

I can't agree more. 

Who would've thought the geeky Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series would be such a hottie? 

References

Moran, M. 2008. What will be the 50 biggest films of 2009? Retrieved Nov 11 2008 from 

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24646267-15803,00.html

Schriver, K. A., 2003, "Chapter six: creating texts for readers," in The Dynamics of Document Design, Wiley Computer Pub., New York.

Walsh, M., 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australia journal of language and literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37