The Martian leads list of film tie-ins ahead of the Oscars

After the Golden Globes in January and the BAFTAs two weeks ago, awards season is now in full swing, leading up to the biggest ceremony of them all: the British Book Industry Awards on 9th May. But before that, we’ve got to get the Oscars out of the way first on Sunday (28th February).

Historically, films adapted from books have always proved to be prime Oscar-bait, with “Schindler’s List”, “The English Patient” and “12 Years a Slave” among the most critically acclaimed Best Picture winners and “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” one of the biggest commercial hits. This year, five Best Picture nominees are adapted from books.

The Martian by Andy Weir (Del Rey) is leading the pack of film tie-ins nominated for the Oscars, with 113,991 units sold. Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (Penguin) is in second place, with 55, 215 units sold. Coming up in third position is The Revenant by Michael Punke (Borough Press), with 49,787 copies shifted, while Room by Emma Donaghue (Picador) is in fourth place, selling 36, 769 units. In the final position is The Big Short by Michael Lewis (Penguin), selling 10, 817 units.  

After the film adaptation of historical revenge epic The Revenant won Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor (for Leonardo DiCaprio) at the Golden Globes in January, the Michael Punke novel experienced a 527% boost in volume week on week and charted inside the Official UK Top 50’s top 10. It has gone on to sell a total 49,787 copies in total to date.

“Room”, adapted from Emma Donaghue’s 2010 Booker-shortlisted novel, has snagged Best Actress for Brie Larson at both the Golden Globes and BAFTAs and the original paperback racked up the most sales out of any nominees this year, at 497,883 copies sold. That edition has been on the shelves since 2011, and achieved those numbers on its own; the film tie-in edition has sold 36,769 copies since December.

Two other nominees for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars were also hits around the turn of the decade: Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, which has shifted 156,160 copies since its release in 2010, and Michael Lewis’ financial crash expose The Big Short, which has sold 78,942 copies since 2011. Each title’s tie-in edition has sold well since the Oscar nominations were announced, with Brooklyn topping 55,000 copies sold.

The biggest-selling Oscar-nominated movie tie-in is Andy Weir’s The Martian (Del Rey), by a few light years. The original novel, which began life as a self-published title, has sold 120,716 copies since August 2014. In the second week of February, the movie tie-in edition, featuring central star and Oscar Best Actor nominee Matt Damon on the cover, rocketed upwards to place second in the Official UK Top 50, increasing its volume by 1,111% week on week to shift 24,338 copies. However, this may have had less to do with the award season’s influence on book-buyers and more to do with the fact that it came out on DVD and Sainsbury’s offered the book as part of a buy one get one free offer.

Awards season success doesn’t necessarily guarantee a boon for a film’s source material: the Cate Blanchett film “Carol”, which was nominated for nine BAFTAs this year and is in the running to take home the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, has failed to boost sales of the original Patricia Highsmith novel, written in 1952 - only the 2010 edition (Bloomsbury) has charted on Nielsen BookScan, with a total volume of 12,698 copies sold to date.

In previous years, losing out on Oscar night has not necessarily meant losing out sales-wise.  Last year’s “The Theory of Everything” won Best Actor (for Eddie Redmayne) but missed out on Best Picture. However, Jane Hawking’s autobiography Travelling to Infinity (Alma) went on to hit the Official UK Top 50 number one spot and has sold 73,690 copies to date. Similarly, American Sniper (William Morrow), whose Oscar loss to “Birdman” in 2015 was greeted with howls of outrage from Fox News and Donald Trump, went on to shift over 200,000 copies in paperback in the UK and over a million in the US. Both Hawking’s and Kyle’s books benefited from similar Sainsbury’s DVD/book deals.

“Life of Pi” was a Best Picture nominee in 2012, a decade after the Yann Martel novel won the Booker Prize. Interestingly, Life of Pi (Canongate), which has sold a total of 1.6m print units across all editions, was mostly unaffected by the success of the film, only shifting a further 300,000 copies in 2012. Even without the film adaptation’s critical acclaim, the title would still be the bestselling Booker winner of the Nielsen BookScan era: it is the only one to surpass one million copies sold.