I have seen a grand total of one film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, that one film was The Notebook and it still torments me to this day. I remember when ROS Box-Office Oracle, Laremy Legel, sent me a sample piece of writing when he wanted to begin reviewing movies for the site and it so happened to be a multi-page rant on how much he hated The Notebook. Obviously, Nicholas Sparks stories aren’t for everyone and Cracked.com has put together a comical post taking the films adapted from his work to task.
Sparks has claimed he has no contemporaries. He writes love stories not the predictable romance novels. “You read a romance because you know what to expect. You read a love story because you don’t know what to expect,” he told USA Today in an interview prior to the release of The Last Song starring Miley Cyrus. In the same interview he even claims his work stands above the likes of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
“No, it’s the difference between Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet,” he says. “(Romances) are all essentially the same story: You’ve got a woman, she’s down on her luck, she meets the handsome stranger who falls desperately in love with her, but he’s got these quirks, she must change him, and they have their conflicts, and then they end up happily ever after.”
So far six of Sparks’s novels have made it to the theater — Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John and The Last Song — and two more (True Believer and The Lucky One) are already in development and I think it’s safe to say studios are going to continue making them as long as they do the business at the box-office they have been. However, while Sparks is calling romance predictable and his love stories unexpected twists saying “you never know if it’s going to be a happy ending, sad ending, bittersweet or tragic,” I guess this is to say that if all of his films ended with the lead characters dying of cancer they would be romances, which is why he throws the audience a death by Leukemia curve ball. Yeah, Sparks sure is the genre bender.
Cracked takes his words to task. Check out the breakdown they posted directly below and certainly click here to read their comical elaborations on the matter.
