A curious pattern emerges when it comes to the cinematic treatment of the breezy beach read, compared to that of the more respectable airport novel. Potboiler, beach read, airport novel, roman de gare: many lovingly refer to these works as trashy literature, filled with a sort of irresistible yet boilerplate pulp and winding plot twists that are impossible to stay away from. Given their widespread appeal, these pieces of light reading are extremely attractive stories for film and television adaptations, creating the perfect soup for a summer blockbuster built from existing IP. The clashing concepts of the beach read and the airport novel are innately gendered: the former is often targeted toward women with a focus on stories filled with romance and pathos, while the latter frequently points to a body of thrillers and easy-to-read dramas with headstrong protagonists. Both the beach read and the airport novel have their time and place. Their film and television adaptations, too. However, despite their shared qualities on the page, there seems to be a clear split in how beach reads and airport novels are adapted for the screen, pointing to a sociocultural phenomenon that has become more pronounced in the last few years.The popularity of recent beach read adaptations such as Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us and Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty for the small screen, may be attributed to the 'BookTok' social media community that flourished first during the COVID era. Content creators often highlight books that tend to fall into this category, including but not limited to young adult fiction and stories seen as “not so serious”: chick lit, as one might pejoratively say, even with their narratives often tackling tough emotional topics and dramatic historical arcs. But despite their often high production value – such as in the case of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton book series – these film and TV adaptations are frequently turned tonally fluffy and visually lighthearted. Furthermore, they are often quickly placed on streaming platforms to reach an expected audience, rather than put into big-screen theatrical exhibition. They neither receive nor are perceived in the same “prestige drama” formation as their airport novel counterparts, which are also marketed as works to not be thought about too hard.The airport novel is arguably of the same mould but on the other side of the gendered thematic spectrum, yet their resulting filmic adaptations are seen as deserving of something decidedly more hifalutin, complete with bankable stars and not simply “celebrities”. Works by Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, James Patterson, led by stern male protagonists with impressive careers and special skillsets dominate the public consciousness and allow for a different type of escapism. A somewhat unexpectedly popular airport read, Robert Harris’ Conclave, fits the category to a tee, yet there remains an irony to its cinematic transformation by Edward Berger. Viewers have quickly seen through the film’s pounding score to the source material's cheesy original story elements, rich colour grading, and stock narrative style. Conclave, which was nominated for eight Oscars, has been widely called "Mean Girls for popes" and spawned fancams of Ralph Fiennes’ and Stanley Tucci’s cardinal characters and other memery up the wazoo. This split follows the Academy Awards norm that only the most serious-presenting dramas are worthy of the highest prizes, regardless of source material or presentation. Airport novels seem to more consistently receive this prestige treatment resulting in box office wins, Oscar nominations, and more widespread respect for the work as opposed to their beach read counterparts. We can even make a prediction and check back on it in several years: Taylor Jenkins Reid’s historical romance The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo grew in popularity on BookTok in 2021 and is set to receive an eagerly-awaited Netflix adaptation, announced in March 2022. By all accounts, the book falls firmly into the beach read category, and although it remains to be seen how the transformation from page to screen will take place, if we take the beach read/airport novel split at face value, it will be hard to expect a full prestige treatment for the film.Existing IP seems to be a contributing factor to this false dichotomy, where works that have not been pre-assigned to a particular archetype are granted with more wiggle room. If there ever were to be a “prestige beach read” this summer that defies these categories, it would be a hypothetical Materialists book – if it were to have been adapted from a novel in the first place. Here, romantic love triangles meet a star-studded cast, all with an Oscar-nominated writer-director backed by A24. But Celine Song’s story is an original one and not crafted from the dredges of a New York Times bestseller, placing it outside of this distorted Venn diagram. Perhaps the divide is a festering symptom of a larger call to endlessly categorise, label, and over-digest, also built on a trend of using developing extant IP into marketable new works rather than original ideas. The expectation seems to be that, in order to capture the book’s audience, an adaptation must be made to replicate everything that came before, artificially forcing books into two camps and two distinct visual and narrative styles. Netflix executives reportedly asked screenwriters to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along”, and other turns to remove nuance and subtext in favour of telling viewers just how to watch their media.Branding and advertising for the small screen, in turn, becomes easier when the “suggested” section is just a repetition of the same film in different fonts; this is the case for both stereotypical beach reads and airport novels. While beach read adaptations become the sprightly background noise for doing laundry, airport novels are instead metamorphosised into the newest high-brow must-watch, cast in deep hues of moody blue and grey. Take Alfonso Cuarón’s Cate Blanchett-led Disclaimer adaptation, for example, from Renée Knight’s 2015 psychological thriller of the same name, filled with the genre’s finest plot twists. The series even enjoyed a premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival before its official Apple TV+ release, cementing it as the series of the season brought directly to you by an auteur himself. And yet, like Conclave, many critics and viewers were sceptical of the prestige exterior it claimed to portray. Maybe pulp really can’t be hidden, after all.Justice for beach reads, which, regretfully, do not get to hide behind this façade of faux sparkle, even at the start. They sit out in all their glory, waiting for another unsuspecting performative Tolstoy reader (or maybe Tarkovsky obsessive) to taser them into submission, bound solely for the BookTok girlies and maybe even beset by celebrity scandal. There’s nothing like a good beach read film consumed with a wine spritz in hand, and they’d gleam further if we gave them the time to be taken as seriously as their airport novel counterparts. It’s time for this oeuvre to shine, where we can proudly claim to love the soapy wonders that it has to offer, on the page and in the cinema. The post My Soapy IP Summer: Beach Read vs Airport Novel Adaptations first appeared on Little White Lies.