Eat Pray Love
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Fight Club
The Beach
Trainspotting
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Recently I was in a bookstore where they had a display of the latest edition of the novel Eat Pray Love. The cover featured Julia Roberts sitting on a bench next to a nun, eating something with a sheepish look on her face and it really annoyed me. I wasn’t annoyed because of her – I don’t mind her, and same thing goes for Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ewan McGregor & company– but because of the whole “oh-now-that-we-made-a-movie-with-that-book-let’s-pretend-that-they’re-the-same-thing” thing. We all know this is rubbish, and that in most case movies based on books end up being very different (sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way).
So why did the publishing company felt like they had to put Julia Roberts on the cover of the book? Don’t we see her enough on the movie posters? See, if I want to own something with her face on it, I’ll buy the DVD. Because she is an actress, not a novel character. I might have been interested in reading the book –though the story sounds a bit too soppy– with its original typography-based cover because it had a concept behind it (“eat” written in pasta, “pray” in beads, etc) and wasn’t like “hey reader, we think you don’t have enough imagination to picture the main character in your head, so here’s a picture of the actress who plays the role in the film so that you have something to relay on”… How annoying!
Marc and I both recently read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* (with the nice colorful jacket) and we also rented the movie to compare scenarios. Even though I enjoyed both I am very happy to have read the book without knowing what the main character looked like in the film and actually, in my head, she was pretty similar to the actress who portrayed her in the film. So now I can say “wow, well done my imagination, you worked well without being dictated how to picture the character by a book cover”. Do you know what I mean?
Anyways, it made me think about the whole “issue” and I’ve checked our bookcase and realized that a lot of the novels we own have been made into films. And that, strangely enough, only one of them, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has the cover featuring Johnny Depp that was made after the film… And we almost certainly bought this version of the book because the original one wasn’t available at the bookstore! In the examples above, I think that the original non-movie tie-in version are all better… What do you think? Any example where the movie-inspired cover beats the original one?
Vick @ Yellow Car Design
*We strongly recommend it and can’t wait to read the sequel. The author was a graphic designer and there are lots of graphic design references… That was an added bonus for us 
