That seems strange that they would they make a book based on a screenplay. They already have the movie so why bother?
From the wikipedia page for Novelization:
Novelizations of films began to be produced in the 1920s for silent films such as London After Midnight (1927). One of the first talking movies to be novelized was King Kong (1933). Film novelizations were especially profitable during the 1970s before home video became available, as they were then the only way to re-experience popular movies. The novelizations of Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) sold millions of copies.
Even after the advent of home video, film novelizations remain popular, with the adaptation of Godzilla (2014) being included on The New York Times Best Seller list for mass-market paperbacks. This has been attributed to these novels' appeal to fans: About 50% of novelizations are sold to people who have watched the film and want to explore its characters further, or to reconnect to the enthusiasm they experienced when watching the film. A film is therefore also a sort of commercial for its novelization.
Conversely, film novelizations help generate publicity for upcoming films, serving as a link in the film's marketing chain.
According to publishing industry estimates, about one or two percent of the audience of a film will buy its novelization. This makes these relatively inexpensively produced works a commercially attractive proposition in the case of blockbuster film franchises. The increasing number of previously established novelists taking on tie-in works has been credited with these works gaining a "patina of respectability" after they had previously been disregarded in literary circles as derivative and mere merchandise.
The writer of a novelization is supposed to multiply the 20,000-25,000 words of a screenplay into at least 60,000 words. Writers usually achieve that by adding description or introspection. Ambitious writers are moreover driven to work on transitions and characters just to accomplish "a more prose-worthy format". Sometimes the "novelizer" moreover invents new scenes in order to give the plot "added dimension", provided he is allowed to do that. It might take an insider to tell whether a novelization diverges instead unintentionally from the finally released film because it is based on an earlier version which possibly included meanwhile deleted scenes. Thus the novelization occasionally already presents material which will later on appear in a Director's Cut. In spite of all restrictions the writers select different approaches to enrich a screenplay. Dewey Gram's Gladiator for example included historial background information. Shaun Hutson refused to write a novelization of Snakes on a Plane because he found the source material too "poor". Still Christa Faust accepted and filled the pages by inventing detailed biographies for some of the early killed passengers. She was then praised for having presented "full three dimensional characters".
Novelization writers are often also accomplished original fiction writers, as well as fans of the works they adapt, which helps motivate them to undertake a commission that is generally compensated with a relatively low flat fee. Alan Dean Foster*, for example, said that, as a fan, "I got to make my own director’s cut. I got to fix the science mistakes, I got to enlarge on the characters, if there was a scene I particularly liked, I got to do more of it, and I had an unlimited budget. So it was fun".
*Foster wrote the novelizations for the first three Alien films and will do Alien: Covenant.
Didn't feel like trying to summarize what I already knew about novelizations. Basically, in addition to making some extra $$$ for the studios, they can help flesh out the story and characters for the viewers without having to wait a year (or, in the case of Aliens, six years, and about ten for Alien3) for a director's cut or special edition to come out. Okay, I guess I just summarized it.
Thit and thpin!
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