Nicholas Sparks appears to have replaced Stephen King and John Grisham as Hollywood’s go-to author.
The writer has already seen several of his romantic dramas turned into movies, including The Horse Whisperer, Nights In Rodanthe, The Notebook, Message In A Bottle and even a Post-It Note, Remember To Get Milk And Eggs, Pay Phone Bill, Call Dentist.*
Then there’s Dear John, currently in production with Lasse Hallstrom yelling at people through a megaphone, and a new novel he's adapting into a movie for Miley Cyrus. But today saw another bright Sparks added to Hollywood’s to-do list, after Warner Bros. snapped up the rights to The Lucky One, his latest bestseller.
Published just last month, it tells the story of a soldier who survives three tours of duty in Iraq, a run of luck he attributes to a photo he carries of a woman he has never met. When he returns home to North Carolina, he decides to track her down, hoping against hope that the photo wasn’t just cut out of a catalogue.**
Denise Di Novi certainly thinks Sparks is the Lucky One, for this will mark the fourth time she’s brought one of his novels to the big screen – Nights In Rodanthe, Message In A Bottle and A Walk To Remember were the other three.
Will this one hit big? Well, so far, audiences have proved curiously resistant to seeing anything that even mentions the word ‘Iraq’, but Sparks films seem to have an inbuilt audience, so this could be one to buck that particular trend.
OK, we made that one up.
** We made that bit up, too.