The Unexpected Effect of Hollywood Cinema: Hit Movies Stimulate Reading

Recently released statistics show that Hollywood blockbusters have drawn young Americans to books. While this is due to the influence of the crowd effect, it shows that the notion that “watching movies will make you read less” is wrong.

According to the Atlantic, the closer a blockbuster movie gets to its release date, the more people will seek to read the original work of literature. This conclusion is based on reading statistics of students in American schools.

The blockbuster movie The Hunger Games had very high revenue, helping the original novel to be a hit as well.

Reading demand increases with popular movies

In a specific example, on September 19, the movie The Maze Runner was released in theaters in the US. The movie was adapted from the novel of the same name by writer James Dashner, written in 2009.

Thanks to the film, more than 10,000 American students had read The Maze Runner since May, when the film was first promoted. And when the new film project was announced in 2011, 3,000 people had read the book.

Another popular film series among teenagers is The Hunger Games. This is the most typical example of the movie fever "contaminating" the original book. Before February 2012, when the first part of the Hunger Games series was released, more than 70,000 American students had read the book. By April, two months after the movie was released, the number had increased to 180,000 people.

Likewise, the 3D animated film The Lorax, based on the children’s book of the same name by Dr. Seuss, saw the number of students reading the original book jump from under 40,000 to nearly 130,000 during its theatrical release in March of this year. The increase in readership was certainly due to the film’s effect, as just a few months later, the number of readers dropped back down to under 50,000.

This surge in popularity is evident in graphs provided by the Accelerated Reader program, which collects data from teachers who survey their students directly, both in and out of the classroom, so it's a fairly accurate reflection of the situation.

About a third of schools in the United States use Accelerated Reader, or 30,000 schools and about 10 million students. Last year, those students read about 330 million books. That’s not a complete picture of the reading ability of students across the country, but it does represent the reading trends influenced by movies.

Accelerated Reader compiles these statistics to support education. “Our goal is to help parents, teachers, and librarians identify the books that teens are reading,” Eric Stickney, a member of the statistics program, told the Atlantic.

The handshake between cinema and literature

Book sales statistics have disproved an old notion: movies will attract the book audience because they are more fashionable, more entertaining, involve more famous people…

So which is the chicken and which is the egg? In this case, the movies and the books have collaborated. Did The Maze Runner books become popular with young people because they were adapted for the big screen, or did the producers see the interest in young people and make an adaptation? According to Stickney, it's actually both.

But if parents are worried that their children will only watch movies and not read books, these data prove that fear is unfounded.

Moreover, the crowd effect among young people also contributes to this cooperation. Young people watch movies or read books in groups, influenced by friends and acquaintances. They cannot help but watch or read to discuss the topic with their friends. Therefore, once the movie becomes a trend, the number of people looking to read books also increases proportionally.

While students are reading books influenced by movies, there are also books that defy this trend. American students have consistently read The Giver and The Great Gatsby.

Although these are two films that were recently adapted and released in theaters (The Giver this August and The Great Gatsby in 2013), both have long been known to many American students because they are part of the general education curriculum.

According to TT&VH