You Better Watch Out!

Gear up! For your favorite read from last season could be hitting the silver screen this year. While not every movie is a Lord of the Rings nor is every other director a Francis Ford Coppola, but there is that one Life of Pi every year which brings lovable characters and great stories to life. While 2012 saw some great books being brought to the theatres as some good and some not so great movies, the year 2013 is going to be no different with both the oldies and the newer brigade of writers providing fodder for cinema goers. So here goes a list of some of books that will come to life this year – high time to start brushing up on the story line again!

The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

A personal favorite that I’m really looking forward to is The Great Gatsby, a six-time cinematic adaptation of the Scott Fitzgerald novel, slated for a summer release. With Hollywood biggies like Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and our very own Amitabh Bachchan on the star cast, the movie promises to be personify the jazz and the beauty of the what is regarded as one of the best works capturing the essence of an era – that era where the American dream of unprecedented prosperity and materialism proved to be fallible after all. And who better to portray the ardor, decadence, excess and vivacity of the time than Baz Luhrmann, the director of the Moulin Rouge. So here’s a read that should lighten up your summer- a classic East vs. West, the Old vs. the New divide in the parlance of that day and age. After all, The Modern Library did name it as the second best English language novel of the 20th Century!

The Host by Stephanie Meyer

A close second would be The Host. If you hear a lot of buzz around this one, it would be just because of that one reason – it’s a Stephanie Meyer Novel. Yes, the same one who gave us Bella and Edward and Jacob. You guessed it right if you are thinking Twilight! So after werewolves and vampires we now move into a realm of parasitic alien souls (The Alien, anyone?). With Oscar nominee Andrew Niccol (with the Gattaca, The Truman Show, Lord of War, In Time and many more hits to his name) at the helm and The Lovely Bones actress Saoirse Ronan as the protagonist, we should be in for a great cinematic experience. This is another novel that may just work out on the big screen. Watch out for this one sometime around March, lest you miss on the next Edward/Jacob in the form of Jake Abel!

Hansel and Gretel by Brothers Grimm

It’s not just the classics and modern fiction that are hitting the silver screen. A brand new take on the German bedtime fairytale – Hansel and Gretel is slated for January release in India. The sibling pair of Hansel and Gretel have supposedly survived their traumatic childhood, thanks to a cannibalistic witch, are now a handsome grown-up pair of – bounty witch hunters! Bond girl Gemma Arterton and action hero Jeremy Renner (of the MI, Avengers, Hurt Locker fame) play the leads in this action packed movie titled as Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters. The trailer looks promising and hopefully the movie will not ruin this fairytale for some of us!

Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks

As always, 2013 continues to be no different when it comes to churning movies out of novels written by Hollywood favorites like Stephen King and Nicholas Sparks. Safe Haven will be the eight film adaptation of a Sparks novel. With such a strike rate, he could well be on his way to have all of his seventeen published novels hit the screens world over! No surprises here, but Safe Haven is slated for a Valentine Day release. If you think that love is truly a safe haven, this would be a perfect read for the oncoming season of love!

Carrie by Stephen King

Taking on a very different genre of horror is Stephen King’s Carrie. Now if you’ve seen the original 1976 movie starring John Travolta, you would know just how eerily scary this movie is! Slated for an autumn release, there are pluses for reading this novel before the release. It would be perfect read on a chilly evening, ensuring that you are left with goose bumps (and looking over dubiously at dark corners and evening shadows). Well, at least you would certainly think twice before bullying anyone as our shy protagonist turns to use her telekinetic powers to extract revenge on those who teased her. Or just give it a shot for the sake of King’s other adaptations like The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption!

Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy Character)

The famed character of Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst who has had a meteoric rise to President of the U.S.A in Tom Clancy’s Novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Sum of All Fear- all legendary novels and movies in their own rights) will be back on the silver screen after a long hiatus of over 11 years. Slated for a year-end release, with this movie we now have Chris Pine as Jack Ryan becoming the fourth actor to assume the role, following Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck. With entire year at your disposal, I assure you, pick up any one Tom Clancy novel, you shall surely be enveloped by Ryan’s world.

It will be interesting to see whether the cinematic adaptations of some of the best-selling novels of their times would hold their ground when compared to the likes to several sequel releases of popular movie series – Die Hard, Hangover, Fast and Furious, G.I Joe, Iron Man, Despicable Me, The Wolverine, Superman and the list goes on! While there are quite a lot of us who wince every time our favorite read of the year is lapped up by Hollywood, this year may just be different. Promising directors and screenplay writers, great actors, amazing sets and graphics – the year 2013 may just surprise you after all!