The movie “novelisation” is a concept that really took off in the late 70s.

Movies adapted from novels have been a thing since the birth of cinema. A few selected movies also were published in book form way back when, notably the original King King. But the popularity of novelisations based on original movie scripts are a more recent phenomena. These were especially popular in the 70s, before home video became available, as a unique way of re-experiencing popular recent movies. It is estimated that around 1-2% of a movie’s audience will buy its novelisation.

Those I have read tend to be basically the movie script in novel form with the occasional added/cut scene (often involving sex, violence or swearing) that were either toned down or didn’t appear in the movie itself.  (Often the writer worked from an early shooting script, in order to get the book ready to tie in with the movie’s release date, so some of the differences were a function of that). It must have been a thankless task for any writer paid to churn these out. 

Sometimes, these novelisations grew into a series above and beyond the movies themselves – this is certainly true of the “Dollars” series, which began with novel versions of the original Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western trilogy but pretty soon had extended into original “Man With No Name” stories such as “A Coffin Full of Dollars” and beyond. (I also once had a large set of novelisations of the UK TV cop series The Sweeney, from the same period, which did more or less the same thing).

The Star Wars novelisation industry began at the same time and has since become a huge phenomena. In the photo above is the original novel for the first movie. Whilst George Lucas is credited as the author, I’m pretty certain he wouldn’t have sat down and typed out a novel version of his movie script personally. (The hapless – and hopefully well paid – ghost writer doesn’t get a credit). 

This was just the first of what became a huge series of franchised novelisations (and later graphic novels) expanding the Star Wars universe and filling in (non-canon) backstories for both major and minor characters. These have subsequently sold millions of copies worldwide.