Sometimes books are mega hits and get turned into movies that take off. There’s just something that captures the zeitgeist and it’s destined to be. Harry Potter came out of nowhere and then turned into a franchise of books, video games, Lego sets, and of course movies. Other times, authors release something that will undoubtedly get picked up as the track record for success is already there. This is the Stephen King special or even Michael Crichton when he was still active. Adaptations can come from cases of re-adaptations like Dracula, Frankenstein, and other classics that get recycled over and over again, especially of they fall into the public domain. There’s the rare case, though, that an unknown author has a manuscript pop and movie studios jump at the chance to create something new. The journey and strange tale of the author of Bird Box falls under that last category. Keep those blindfolds tight as we find out what happened to this adaptation.
The Movie
Netflix releases nearly one originally produced movie every week now but originally the service was just streaming other works or even earlier a disc mailing service. 2015 is when they really started ramping up production for their original programming and one of their first ever projects, Beasts of No Nation, garnered plenty of buzz, views, and awards nominations. Back in 2013, though, Universal decided to take a chance on a book that wasn’t even published yet and bought the rights to a book called Bird Box by an author who had never had anything published yet. Their plan was to have Eric Heisserer write the script and Andy Muschietti direct the film. Heisserer has a fun and strange resume of scripts that include an Academy Award nomination for Arrival as well as stuff like Bloodshot, Lights Out, Final Destination 5, and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake among others. Muschietti is most famous for the two IT movies from 2017 and 2019 as well as The Flash and Mama. This, of course, wasn’t to be.
The producers on the original planned movie were Scott Stuber and Chris Morgan but when Stuber became the head of Netflix’s feature film division in 2017, he was able to acquire the rights to the novel again. This led to their first big catches of Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich for leading roles. Sandra Bullock hasn’t done a ton of horror but did make things like Murder by Numbers, Premonition, and the American remake of The Vanishing. Malkovich on the other hand has not done much horror at all apart from serial killer flick Jennifer 8 and the fake making of Nosferatu horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire. Throughout the rest of 2017, the cast would fill out with Trevante Rhodes, Jackie Weaver, Sarah Paulson, Rosa Salazar, BD Wong, and a host of others. The music would also be done by the team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross who won Academy Awards for both The Social Network and later Soul.
The director that ended up being chosen as a replacement for Muschietti was Susanne Bier. Bier had done some higher profile things like Things We Lost in the Fire, The Night Manager, and Serena with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence and has since gone on to do more TV work. The movie was shot in California; in Santa Cruz and Monrovia, specifically, with the special effects being done by ILM. The movie had a brief theatrical run in early December before coming to the Netflix streaming service later that month on December 21st, 2018. While the reviews were middling for the project, the viewer numbers were quite good. The budget of the movie was just under 20 million and the service reported that 26 million viewers watched the movie within the first seven days of its release.
The book had come out in 2014, and this gave it a lot more interest as people wanted to see how similar the two properties were. Ya know, kinda like this show. A sequel would come out in 2023, but it didn’t have nearly the acclaim or viewership numbers. Bird Box became the most viewed Netflix property with over 282 million hours viewed and would hold that distinction until the streamer’s 2021 movie Red Notice.
The Book
Josh Malerman is an interesting story. He is the author of today’s book, but he is also the lead singer and songwriter of a Detroit band called The High Strung. The band is one that I’ve never heard of but they are old school and played 250 shows a year while traveling the country. This particularly talented individual wrote 14 manuscripts while just chilling in the passenger seat, roaming around the US. He considered it a passion more than a hobby but claims that he never expected any of them to get published and certainly not get as big as Bird Box was when it came out. His friend Dave from high school saw some real talent in Malerman’s writing and asked permission to send some of his work over to publisher friends he had who also happened to have friends in Hollywood.
What ended up being sent over was something called Goblin which was a collection of novellas that all took place in a city called, you guessed it, Goblin. While the publishes didn’t fall in love with that collection immediately, they liked his writing enough and thankfully he had a bunch of other material to, as he put it, “talk shop with.” This would lead to Bird Box being picked not only for publication but also having its movie rights purchased as we discussed earlier. 2014 would be the year that the book came out and he has been steady since then with 12 more novels being published in the span of a decade. He also has multiple novellas and a whole ton of short stories that have ended up in multiple different magazines and collections. Of importance to this episode, a sequel to Bird Box called Malorie was published in 2020 that takes place two years after the first story. This is different than the Netflix spinoff that we got in 2023. Malerman has also kept up his first love with 28 album releases since 1998.
What is the same?
Malorie is our main character and the story opens in the present day with two children accompanying her. We then jump back in time and see the beginning of an apocalyptic event that has mass hysteria and humans everywhere ending their lives after seeing creatures that make them go crazy. Malorie’s sister dies and, being pregnant and afraid, she heads to a house that has survivors that include Olympia, who is also pregnant, and Cheryl, among others. The group splits up and heads out blindfolded to get supplies and Malorie ends up taking a few birds with them as well, as she notices that birds tend to get upset when the creatures are near. After some time, a new passerby named Gary seeks shelter and the group lets him in.
Gary has escaped a different group who chose to look at the creatures and have gone insane. Olympia and Malorie go into labor at the same time, and both give birth, but Gary is able to kill most of the group by opening the windows and letting them see the creatures. He is immune to the forces they present but also wants to watch others give in in service of the monsters. Years later, Malorie is taking care of the children, and their names are simply Boy and Girl as she doesn’t want to get attached to them and names are now not important. She eventually makes it to a safe haven that was formerly a school for the blind. There are blind people there and she eventually relents and names the children Tom and Olympia.
What is different?
There are quite a few smaller differences, like with names. The names of the survivors she encounters in the house and the name of her sister are also different. Her sister’s death is slightly different as well, with the book character purposefully going out a window while Jessica in the movie crashes a car and then lets herself get hit by another one. In the book, Malorie sees a newspaper ad a good amount of time after the inciting incident that leads her to the other survivors, but the movie has no breaks like that, and Malorie is rushed into a house by one of the other survivors. The book group searches nearby houses for supplies while the movie group goes to one of the survivor’s old grocery stores that they used to work for. Gary is a lot more menacing in the book. He comes off as a cult leader and is even able to convince one of the survivors to let him stay in the basement after he is asked to leave where he turns him crazy as well.
This leads to what happens in the house, where he is able to get the survivors to go mad and kill each other. He is killed in the movie by a character who isn’t even in the book, Tom. Gary in the book is an ever-present threat that Malorie worries about even after she leaves with a dog named Victor and the kids. Tom is the one that rushes her into the house and goes with her after he kills Gary and is the only other adult survivor. They head to a cabin where they live for years before another band of crazy survivors finds them and he is able to stop them but only by removing his blindfold which costs him his life as well. None of that happens in the book, as Malorie takes a dog with her and the kids where we find that animals aren’t actually immune like they thought. Another character, played by BD Wong in the movie, is only a past tense story in the novel. The same fate falls to him as he tests if you can look at the creatures through video but in the movie, it happens in real time.
Finally, there are a lot more instances of crazy survivor humans who want to help the creatures in the movie. The book does a good job of dragging out the events over months and years while the movie has just the one big time jump.
Legacy
The book was a smash success and an instant example of everyone wanting to read it. It still shows up on lists of horror books for book clubs and on internet lists, but the sequel came and went 6 years later. Unfortunately, after how poorly the Bird Box Barcelona side story movie did, I can’t imagine the sequel movie getting made unless Sandra Bullock produces it and wants to play that character again. I enjoyed the movie when I saw it but I think I enjoyed the book much more. It’s not a difficult read and I feel it has better horror and nuance with its characters. I’d recommend both as they are fairly different and that’s always fun but I’m going to give the victory to the book.
A couple of the previous episodes of What Happened to This Adaptation? can be seen below. To see the other shows we have to offer, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!