The 2024 adaptations
Book-to-film adaptations released in 2024 were dominated by 2 things at once: a very large commercial middle built on contemporary bestsellers, and an unusually strong awards run built on literary fiction and reported non-fiction. Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two in March and Justin Baldoni's It Ends with Us in August carried the first; Edward Berger's Conclave and RaMell Ross's Nickel Boys in the autumn carried the second. What makes 2024 useful as a year to study is that those 4 films travel very different distances from their sources while all being called faithful by somebody.
The year's shape: a franchise spine and a literary autumn
The year's shape was set in March, when Dune: Part Two completed a 2 film pass through Frank Herbert's 1965 novel that Villeneuve had begun in 2021. Adapting one novel across 2 features is the structural decision of the decade in this field, and it is what let the second film hold plot and theme close while moving a central character a long way: Chani, in the film, is given a sceptical position on Paul that the novel does not give her. Plot preserved, character reassigned, theme sharpened. That is a legitimate adaptation strategy and it is also a real change, and a reference should say both.
The autumn ran on prose that no one expected to film easily. Conclave, from Robert Harris's 2016 novel, kept its source almost intact and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2025. Nickel Boys, from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel of 2019, kept the plot and rebuilt the telling entirely, shooting most of the film from inside its characters' eyes. Same fidelity claim, opposite methods.
Whitehead narrates in close third person, with the reader positioned slightly outside two boys and able to see what neither of them can. The withheld information is structural.
Ross puts the camera behind the eyes. You see only what the character sees, which converts the novel's controlled distance into something the viewer cannot step back from.
How far each 2024 adaptation travelled
Measuring how far each film travelled means judging plot, character, voice and theme separately, because a film can hold 3 of those and lose the fourth completely. The bars below are this site's own reading, not a studio's and not a review aggregate.
| Work | Book | Film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conclave | 2016 | 2024 | |
| It Ends with Us | 2016 | 2024 | |
| The Wild Robot | 2016 | 2024 | |
| Dune: Part Two | 1965 | 2024 | |
| Nickel Boys | 2019 | 2024 | |
| Wicked | 1995 | 2024 |
Wicked sits furthest out for a reason that has nothing to do with quality. It is a chain adaptation: Gregory Maguire's novel of 1995 became a stage musical in 2003, and the 2024 film adapts the musical. Two crossings compound, and the tone of the novel, which is considerably darker and more political than the show, is almost entirely absent by the second one. Measure the film against the stage version and the distance drops sharply; measure it against the book and it is the year's longest journey.
The commercial engine: Colleen Hoover and children's fiction
The commercial engine of 2024 was contemporary popular fiction with a proven readership, and the clearest single case is It Ends with Us, taken from Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel. The novel is written in first person, and its power sits in a narrator revising her own account of what is happening to her. A film cannot revise silently, so the adaptation externalises the reveal, which is a real loss of mechanism even where the plot is intact.
Children's and young-adult fiction supplied the other reliable stream. The Wild Robot, from Peter Brown's 2016 book, expanded a spare, illustrated text into a feature and added emotional scale the page keeps quiet. Uglies, from Scott Westerfeld's 2005 novel, went straight to Netflix in September and compressed a series opener into a single film, which is the standard failure mode for serial young-adult fiction: the book's first volume is written to withhold, and a standalone film has to resolve.
What 2024 shows about non-fiction on screen
Non-fiction adaptation had a strong 2024, and it behaves differently from novel adaptation in one specific way: the source supplies research rather than structure. A Complete Unknown, released in December, is built on Elijah Wald's 2015 study of Bob Dylan's move to electric performance, and what it takes from the book is a factual frame, not a narrative shape. The screenwriter has to invent the scenes. That is the reverse of the novel problem, where the scenes already exist and the interior life has to be replaced.
The same year produced a clean example of a very old book crossing again: the French The Count of Monte Cristo, from Alexandre Dumas's 1844 novel, which had been filmed many times before. A book with no living rights holder can be adapted freely and repeatedly, which is why the 19th century keeps returning to cinemas while contemporary bestsellers wait years for an option to clear.
Reading 2024 against the years on either side
Read against 2025 and 2026, the 2024 slate is the clearest recent case of the theatrical adaptation and the streaming adaptation running as separate businesses. Cinema took the franchise instalments and the awards titles, Dune: Part Two in March and Conclave in the autumn among them; streaming took young-adult titles that would once have opened in cinemas, of which Uglies in September is the plain example. 2025 kept a run of adaptations in cinemas, including 4 films from Stephen King texts: The Monkey in February, The Life of Chuck in June, The Long Walk in September and The Running Man in November. 2026 is not finished and cannot yet be summarised, but its largest adaptations so far played theatrically, Project Hail Mary in March and The Odyssey in July. Whether the mid-budget adaptation follows them back into cinemas or stays on the platforms is the thread worth tracing, and it is not settled.