My Soapy IP Sum­mer: Beach Read vs Air­port Nov­el Adaptations

Pot­boil­er, beach read, air­port nov­el, roman de gare: many lov­ing­ly refer to these works as trashy lit­er­a­ture, filled with a sort of irre­sistible yet boil­er­plate pulp and wind­ing plot twists that are impos­si­ble to stay away from. Giv­en their wide­spread appeal, these pieces of light read­ing are extreme­ly attrac­tive sto­ries for film and tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tions, cre­at­ing the per­fect soup for a sum­mer block­buster built from exist­ing IP. The clash­ing con­cepts of the beach read and the air­port nov­el are innate­ly gen­dered: the for­mer is often tar­get­ed toward women with a focus on sto­ries filled with romance and pathos, while the lat­ter fre­quent­ly points to a body of thrillers and easy-to-read dra­mas with head­strong pro­tag­o­nists. Both the beach read and the air­port nov­el have their time and place. Their film and tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tions, too. How­ev­er, despite their shared qual­i­ties on the page, there seems to be a clear split in how beach reads and air­port nov­els are adapt­ed for the screen, point­ing to a socio­cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that has become more pro­nounced in the last few years.

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of recent beach read adap­ta­tions such as Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us and Jen­ny Han’s The Sum­mer I Turned Pret­ty for the small screen, may be attrib­uted to the ​‘Book­Tok’ social media com­mu­ni­ty that flour­ished first dur­ing the COVID era. Con­tent cre­ators often high­light books that tend to fall into this cat­e­go­ry, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to young adult fic­tion and sto­ries seen as ​“not so seri­ous”: chick lit, as one might pejo­ra­tive­ly say, even with their nar­ra­tives often tack­ling tough emo­tion­al top­ics and dra­mat­ic his­tor­i­cal arcs. But despite their often high pro­duc­tion val­ue – such as in the case of Julia Quinn’s Bridger­ton book series – these film and TV adap­ta­tions are fre­quent­ly turned tonal­ly fluffy and visu­al­ly light­heart­ed. Fur­ther­more, they are often quick­ly placed on stream­ing plat­forms to reach an expect­ed audi­ence, rather than put into big-screen the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion. They nei­ther receive nor are per­ceived in the same ​“pres­tige dra­ma” for­ma­tion as their air­port nov­el coun­ter­parts, which are also mar­ket­ed as works to not be thought about too hard.

The air­port nov­el is arguably of the same mould but on the oth­er side of the gen­dered the­mat­ic spec­trum, yet their result­ing filmic adap­ta­tions are seen as deserv­ing of some­thing decid­ed­ly more hifa­lutin, com­plete with bank­able stars and not sim­ply ​“celebri­ties”. Works by Robert Lud­lum, Dan Brown, James Pat­ter­son, led by stern male pro­tag­o­nists with impres­sive careers and spe­cial skillsets dom­i­nate the pub­lic con­scious­ness and allow for a dif­fer­ent type of escapism. 

A some­what unex­pect­ed­ly pop­u­lar air­port read, Robert Har­ris’ Con­clave, fits the cat­e­go­ry to a tee, yet there remains an irony to its cin­e­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion by Edward Berg­er. View­ers have quick­ly seen through the film’s pound­ing score to the source mate­ri­al’s cheesy orig­i­nal sto­ry ele­ments, rich colour grad­ing, and stock nar­ra­tive style. Con­clave, which was nom­i­nat­ed for eight Oscars, has been wide­ly called ​“Mean Girls for popes” and spawned fan­cams of Ralph Fiennes’ and Stan­ley Tucci’s car­di­nal char­ac­ters and oth­er memery up the wazoo.

This split fol­lows the Acad­e­my Awards norm that only the most seri­ous-pre­sent­ing dra­mas are wor­thy of the high­est prizes, regard­less of source mate­r­i­al or pre­sen­ta­tion. Air­port nov­els seem to more con­sis­tent­ly receive this pres­tige treat­ment result­ing in box office wins, Oscar nom­i­na­tions, and more wide­spread respect for the work as opposed to their beach read coun­ter­parts. We can even make a pre­dic­tion and check back on it in sev­er­al years: Tay­lor Jenk­ins Reid’s his­tor­i­cal romance The Sev­en Hus­bands of Eve­lyn Hugo grew in pop­u­lar­i­ty on Book­Tok in 2021 and is set to receive an eager­ly-await­ed Net­flix adap­ta­tion, announced in March 2022. By all accounts, the book falls firm­ly into the beach read cat­e­go­ry, and although it remains to be seen how the trans­for­ma­tion from page to screen will take place, if we take the beach read/​airport nov­el split at face val­ue, it will be hard to expect a full pres­tige treat­ment for the film.

Exist­ing IP seems to be a con­tribut­ing fac­tor to this false dichoto­my, where works that have not been pre-assigned to a par­tic­u­lar arche­type are grant­ed with more wig­gle room. If there ever were to be a ​“pres­tige beach read” this sum­mer that defies these cat­e­gories, it would be a hypo­thet­i­cal Mate­ri­al­ists book – if it were to have been adapt­ed from a nov­el in the first place. Here, roman­tic love tri­an­gles meet a star-stud­ded cast, all with an Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed writer-direc­tor backed by A24. But Celine Song’s sto­ry is an orig­i­nal one and not craft­ed from the dredges of a New York Times best­seller, plac­ing it out­side of this dis­tort­ed Venn diagram. 

Per­haps the divide is a fes­ter­ing symp­tom of a larg­er call to end­less­ly cat­e­gorise, label, and over-digest, also built on a trend of using devel­op­ing extant IP into mar­ketable new works rather than orig­i­nal ideas. The expec­ta­tion seems to be that, in order to cap­ture the book’s audi­ence, an adap­ta­tion must be made to repli­cate every­thing that came before, arti­fi­cial­ly forc­ing books into two camps and two dis­tinct visu­al and nar­ra­tive styles. Net­flix exec­u­tives report­ed­ly asked screen­writ­ers to ​“have this char­ac­ter announce what they’re doing so that view­ers who have this pro­gram on in the back­ground can fol­low along”, and oth­er turns to remove nuance and sub­text in favour of telling view­ers just how to watch their media.

Brand­ing and adver­tis­ing for the small screen, in turn, becomes eas­i­er when the ​“sug­gest­ed” sec­tion is just a rep­e­ti­tion of the same film in dif­fer­ent fonts; this is the case for both stereo­typ­i­cal beach reads and air­port nov­els. While beach read adap­ta­tions become the spright­ly back­ground noise for doing laun­dry, air­port nov­els are instead meta­mor­pho­sised into the newest high-brow must-watch, cast in deep hues of moody blue and grey. Take Alfon­so Cuarón’s Cate Blanchett-led Dis­claimer adap­ta­tion, for exam­ple, from Renée Knight’s 2015 psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller of the same name, filled with the genre’s finest plot twists. The series even enjoyed a pre­mière at the 2024 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val before its offi­cial Apple TV+ release, cement­ing it as the series of the sea­son brought direct­ly to you by an auteur him­self. And yet, like Con­clave, many crit­ics and view­ers were scep­ti­cal of the pres­tige exte­ri­or it claimed to por­tray. Maybe pulp real­ly can’t be hid­den, after all.

Jus­tice for beach reads, which, regret­ful­ly, do not get to hide behind this façade of faux sparkle, even at the start. They sit out in all their glo­ry, wait­ing for anoth­er unsus­pect­ing per­for­ma­tive Tol­stoy read­er (or maybe Tarkovsky obses­sive) to taser them into sub­mis­sion, bound sole­ly for the Book­Tok girlies and maybe even beset by celebri­ty scan­dal. There’s noth­ing like a good beach read film con­sumed with a wine spritz in hand, and they’d gleam fur­ther if we gave them the time to be tak­en as seri­ous­ly as their air­port nov­el coun­ter­parts. It’s time for this oeu­vre to shine, where we can proud­ly claim to love the soapy won­ders that it has to offer, on the page and in the cinema.