Evil genius dashes off winners
Movies attract fans who love to cry on cue
Best-selling author Nicholas Sparks had an unusually candid response last year when The Hollywood Reporter asked him about the prospects for Safe Haven, the latest in his long line of film adaptations of his romance novels.
“I’m sure it’ll do fine at the box office. They all do,” he said, laughing.
“I mean, it’s why they keep making them, right?”
Well, that’s rather cocky — but also 100 per cent accurate. Like all his tear-jerker films before it, Safe Haven, indeed did just fine (eventually raking in $70 million) and the Sparks’ film factory churned steadily along. Now, the author’s latest book-turned-movie, The Best of Me, looks like the next reliable entry in his unstoppable movie empire.
The Sparks movie adaptations started in 1999 with Message in a Bottle, followed in 2002 with A Walk to Remember — but the franchise didn’t really pick up steam until the smash success of The Notebook (2004). The Ryan Gosling-Rachel McAdams sobfest launched memes before memes really existed and solidified Sparks’s library as a solid box office draw. Five more films followed. Two more are currently in production.
The reason for the longevity? In short, he’s an evil genius.
No, really, that’s the only explanation. It’s a special talent to create stories so devastatingly sappy the audience is guaranteed to cry, yet appealing enough to compel them to come back for more. Sparks’s formula plays into the viewing public’s desire for comfortable predictability ... with a twist. In each of his works, Sparks reels you in with the ultimate relatable theme — love! — and sprinkles in just enough surprises that no two are ever the same. At this point, seeing a Nicholas Sparks movie is like listening to a remake of an old song: You know all the beats, but it’s just different enough to keep your attention.
The main plot line is always an against-the-odds love story, though the challenges vary: Alzheimer’s (The Notebook), war (Dear John, The Lucky One), cancer (The Last Song), family dysfunction (Best of Me) and hey, even ghosts (Safe Haven). The endings are generally not happy, but who doesn’t love a good cry?
Despite the shmaltz, many Hollywood big shots have made the obligatory stop in a Sparks’s flick.
For any of them, it’s a nice paycheque for work that, as Sparks knows better than anyone, will do exactly what it’s supposed to do — and pave the way for the next movie to arrive the following year.