ACOTAR and Sarah Maas Should Be Hollywood’s Next Marvel Moment (2024)

Book publishers are benefitting from the boom in romance and fantasy. Can Hollywood studios fall in love with it, too?

By Jessica Karl
Graphics by Taylor Tyson August 19, 2024

Valentine’s Day might be a little less than 200 days away, but love is in the air.

And by that, I mean: It Ends With Us, an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover romance novel featuring Blake Lively, is dominating the box office. My Lady Jane — a hilarious reimagining of Tudor history, replete with shapeshifters and sexual tension — is the summer’s must-binge show. And on the beach, the season’s must-read books are out-of-this-world hot. Even Walmart teamed up with hot sauce maker Melinda’s to create a line of condiments “inspired by book lovers who don’t mind a little spice.”

Although love, sex and everything in between has long had a chokehold on consumers — hello, Danielle Steel — a new generation of romance readers and writers is redefining what it means to have an HEA, or “Happily Ever After.” Romantasy novels — a combination of romance and fantasy featuring love interests with healing magic, mystical typewriters and inner demons — are driving the change.

The spike in readership has been a boon for the book industry, yet TV and movie executives aren’t as energized by romantasy as readers. Why the hesitation? A male-dominated industry that’s blind to the tastes and interests of women and other marginalized groups is afraid to take risks and invest capital. As Hollywood studios wade through uncertain financial waters, they’re leaning on proven formulas and franchises – think Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings – not uncharted genres.

By staying on the sidelines, Hollywood is missing a major opportunity to get its creative juices flowing again. It’s not like the industry isn’t used to literary adaptations. Last year alone, 46% of all theatrical releases fell under that umbrella or were remakes, according to Luminate. But that doesn’t always equate to success. Marvel, once a safe bet for Hollywood executives, is the most glaring example. Since Disney acquired the franchise for $4 billion in 2009, it’s released a surfeit of inconsistent programming that’s mostly failed to excite even hardcore loyalists.

While Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest gambit in the superhero universe, had the highest R-rated opening of all time — raking in $441 million worldwide — it comes after big budget flops from the franchise, such as 2023’s The Marvels and Ant Man and Wasp: Quantumania and several disappointing Disney+ television series.

Romantasy offers producers something they haven’t had since the Twilight and True Blood craze of the aughts: A treasure trove of largely untouched, screen-ready IP beloved by women, queer individuals and others who are too often left out of the entertainment equation. There’s just one catch: Men in the C-suite will need to share or cede creative control for that huge and underserved audience to see any of it. The data alone ought to convince them to do just that.

Charting the Romantasy Book Boom

Are you intrigued by an arranged marriage between the daughter of a vampire councilman and an alpha werewolf? Read Ali Hazelwood’s Bride. Or is a steamy Norse-inspired novel involving infidelity and blood oaths more your thing? Danielle L. Jensen’s A Fate Inked in Blood is perfect for you. How about a pair of queer Black girls who catch feelings for each other while investigating a wake of supernatural murders in 1920s Harlem? The first installment of Hayley Dennings’ romantasy duology, This Ravenous Fate, just hit shelves.

Romantasy’s diverse range of characters and tropes supports what scholars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities found in 2023. When they dissected “shelf” data from Goodreads, the Amazon-owned book review site, they discovered that romance is a genre juggernaut: “Far from being just one genre of fiction among others, romance is the genre of genres, a veritable genre ecosystem in its own right,” the authors wrote in Public Books Magazine. We’ve certainly come a long way since the bodice-rippers of the 70s and the Fabio covers of the 80s and 90s.

One book reigns supreme: Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, or “ACOTAR,” for the BookTok-literate. It’s somewhat of a gateway for non-romantasy readers. In the years since she published her first book, Throne of Glass, in 2012, nearly 40 million copies of her books — in 38 languages — are in the hands of readers.

Many literary traditionalists — including those who voted for The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, which carried zero titles by Maas — are unwilling to recognize the boom. Perhaps they are dismissing romantasy as nothing more than a passing fad of “fairy p*rn” for Gen Zers on TikTok. But these books are single-handedly propelling the publishing industry to greater heights. And they’re increasingly occupying The New York Times bestseller list, as our analysis that cross-references the titles with Goodreads genre tags shows. In 2024 alone, one out of every four bestsellers were romantasy.

Bloomsbury, which publishes Mass’ work, is a major beneficiary of the boom. When its most recent fiscal year ended on Feb. 29, the company announced a record 30% revenue jump and a record-high 57% increase in profits from the year prior. Bloomsbury CEO Nigel Newton calls Maas “a publishing phenomenon.” Sales of her titles soared by 161% in the last fiscal year, and according to Circana BookScan, she’s already sold more books in 2024 than the top 10 most popular new releases combined.

While there’s certainly plenty of pent up sexual tension between fated mates in romantasy books to draw in readers, it’s the worldbuilding that keeps audiences engaged. Spoiler alert: For example, Maas’ latest book — the third volume in the Crescent City series, House of Flame and Shadow — confirmed what many readers had long suspected: All three series she’s written take place in the same megaverse — a critical earmark of high fantasy. Some fans have gone so far as to make “ investigation walls ” to discover the overlaps and easter eggs hidden within each storyline.​

In many ways, Maas is the Stan Lee of the romance world. Her ability to intertwine worlds and storylines across time is not unlike what you see today with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet Marvel struggles where Maas does not. The superhero landscape is far too saturated; the ACOTAR megaverse is still in its infancy.

And as Hollywood tries to get people back into theaters on a more consistent basis, one solution film experts have pointed to is for the industry to start making movie-going feel like an event again.

Executives and marketing teams have an abundance of characters and settings, not to mention a whole community of fans on TikTok, to help guide them in this endeavor if they bring romantasy to the big screen. And even if these projects are on the small screen, eventizing them — à la Bridgerton’s The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience — can be a success.

Hollywood’s Romantasy Risk

On one level, Hollywood already knows that romance books are the Next Big Thing. Bridgerton’s third season got over 45 million views on Netflix in its premiere weekend. And producers are hiring A-Listers such as Blake Lively and Anne Hathaway to star in romantic dramas. And romance author Emily Henry has not one but five film adaptations in the works.

Although the mountain of regular romance stories slated to be turned into movies or TV shows is growing taller by the day, ones involving magic are a tougher sell. The beauty of romantasy is that readers are able to concoct and visualize a new world within the confines of their mind. Bringing that world — and all the winged and scaled characters inside of it — to life requires an immense amount of planning, special effects and money.

While Hollywood is no stranger to such ventures, the industry is undergoing cost-cutting measures — exacerbated by last summer’s actors’ and writers’ strikes — that make it harder to meet romantasy’s demand.

Take Maas’s ACOTAR. A series with Hulu has been stuck in limbo for years at this point, despite the feverish admiration for her books. Going hand-in-hand with budget restraints is the pressure to get every detail of these adaptations right or suffer the wrath of fans. When speaking with fantasy author Natania Barron, whose queer regency-era romance Netherford Hall hit shelves this month, she pointed out the risks in getting it wrong: “With ACOTAR, there’s such a preciousness about these characters. How are you going to be Feyre? Or Rhysand? Or Lucien? People have tattoos of them on their bodies. In my town, someone has a Velaris bumper sticker on their car. The level of fandom is just massive.”

Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing also has a huge fan base, having spent more than 60 weeks and counting on The New York Times bestseller list. Amazon Prime recently announced that Moira Walley-Beckett, a writer for Breaking Bad and Anne With an E, will be the showrunner for the screen adaptation. But plenty of fans are skeptical about whether the TV version of the main love interests, Violet Sorrengail and Xaden Riorson, will live up to expectations. “If they give Violet a bad wig I’m going to lose it,” reads a comment with over 6,000 likes on Instagram. Other fans wondered whether Amazon will tame the sex scenes: “We want the spice, and we want [Game of Thrones]-level dragons.”

For Karah Preiss, the editorial director of Belletrist (a digital book club-turned-production company she co-founded with actress Emma Roberts in 2017), there’s nothing more important than stan culture. Together with Roberts, she’s brought books to life with film adaptations such as Netflix’s First Kill and Hulu’s Tell Me Lies, season 2 of which comes out on Sept. 4. “As someone who produces a show that has a toxic relationship at the center of it, I can tell you that romance is very, very, very valuable,” she told me. “Every show lives and dies by stanship. If you aren’t rooting for someone, it doesn’t work. That’s why Jenny Han does such an amazing job with The Summer I Turned Pretty. She understands the importance of stanning — of being obsessed with characters and having an opinion like it’s a sport.”

Likewise, romantasy relies on stan culture. And fans can be even less forgiving when it comes to the details. Think about how many more things could go wrong when producing fantasy versus a modern romance drama. If any of the world-building and character development goes astray in a romantasy, fans will harp on shoddy visual effects, and that’s not even considering other risks associated with adaptations, such as poor writing or bad casting.

Netflix’s decision to cancel fantasy franchises Fate: The Winx Saga and Shadow and Bone after their second seasons illustrates those pitfalls. With Winx, showrunners were accused of whitewashing characters who were East Asian and Latina in the original animated series. And with Shadow and Bone — based on books in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse — characters and storylines were far too muddled. (Hollywood strike delays and a high price tag likely factored into the cancellation, too.)

Since both series centered on women, maybe those failures say less about romantasy and more about how Hollywood falls short in executing female narratives. Franklin Leonard, an American film executive and founder of The Black List, a platform for writers to share their screenplays, pilots and other works with industry professionals, told me as much. Hollywood’s default “is an able-bodied, straight, White male,” he said. “Stories in this genre — romance, romantasy … books that are targeted at women and are written by women — are under-optioned. There’s just not as many of them made compared to Marvel movies, and they don’t get as big budgets. That is, despite the fact that when movies are made by women, for women, the ROI actually exceeds that of primarily male-targeted movies.”

In other words: “Men run Hollywood and have a blind spot on this,” Leonard said. The bright side, he adds, is that romantasy “hasn’t yet been stripped in the way that Marvel Comics and male-driven fantasy and sci-fi has.”

Taking a Page From Marvel’s Playbook

Change won’t happen overnight. Camryn Garrett, an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and filmmaker, and I discussed it. “There was a period where dystopian fiction trends in YA books bled over into movies, but we’re not seeing that quite yet for romantasy,” she said, but she is really interested to see where the genre is in a year or two.

Maybe there is a way to cut down on that time. If studios aren’t willing to send more female fantasies to the big and little screen, what’s stopping romance publishers from stealing a page from Marvel’s playbook? Think about it: Three decades ago, Marvel was little more than a bankrupt toy company. Then, at its height, its cinematic universe became the bedrock of American monoculture.

The key to the franchise’s success? Total creative control. But it wasn’t always that way: In the early 2000s, the company was losing out on revenue by licensing out characters to other studios. Spider-Man yielded less than $30 million for Marvel, while Sony made upwards of $100 million on it. The X-Men deal with Fox was even worse. Other licensed characters — including one Tony Stark — were sitting unused.

That all changed after a fateful lunch in 2003, when businessman David Maisel gave Ike Perlmutter — then-vice chairman of Marvel — a pitch: Launch a self-financed and self-producing studio. According to the authors of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, when it came to Stark, Maisel told Perlmutter: “Your character is in limbo, and somebody else controls it. When you make a movie deal for a license, you’re freezing animation, you’re freezing a lot of other things. You’re handing over your babies to somebody, and nothing happens.” By the end of the lunch, Maisel was hired. Two years later, he landed on a financing deal for Marvel Studios with Merrill Lynch. Three years after that, in 2008, the studio’s first film — Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. — hit theaters.

History clearly rhymes: Instead of Marvel’s Tony Stark, it’s ACOTAR’s leading lady, Feyre Archeron, who’s stuck in production limbo.

Romantasy books might be getting optioned by studios, but plenty of those contracts may collect dust and expire with little fanfare. If publishers were to invest in their own in-house film studios, it would greatly diminish the risk of a beloved book getting caught in development limbo. Plus, having people at the helm who are emotionally tethered to the storylines would ensure the characters and settings come close to what fans have envisioned. Imagine the accolades that could follow a more robust book-to-screen ecosystem. Amazon, after all, just got a Primetime Emmy nomination for Red, White & Royal Blue, an LGBTQ rom-com based on Casey McQuiston’s hit book.

Awards season aside, the payoff can be huge for publishers when Hollywood invests in romance. A recent survey by the American Library Association found that TV and movies are the second-favorite way for Gen Zers and millennials to discover books, behind recommendations from friends. Bridgerton is proof of that: US sales of the books by Julia Quinn increased by 552% between the week before the season 3 TV trailer was released and the week after the season premiered on Netflix. Similar spikes are visible on Goodreads shelf data for My Lady Jane and The Idea of You, the adaptations of which both premiered on Amazon Prime.

Audiobook streamers, too, benefit from the page-to-screen pipeline. Spotify reported a 470% boost in audiobook listeners in the week following the release of a title’s respective film or television adaptation. In that light, romantasy movies and TV adaptations aren’t merely an endgame; they’re part of a cycle, acting as a catalyst that encourages viewers to engage with the original text, listen to podcasts and buy merchandise.

We’re fresh on the heels of a female-led consumerism boom with Barbie and the concerts and concert films of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Women and other marginalized communities have money to spend. And that message — of independence, of inclusivity, of unabashed love for the genre — is not lost in the plot. At 831 Stories, a new romance imprint launching its debut book Big Fan on Sept. 10, Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur are energized by female characters who “are more self-possessed and confident and just generally have their lives together.” The opportunities for monetizing that message — whether it be with collectible books, bonus content, Spotify playlists or special events — are endless.

If Hollywood manages to embrace romantasy with open arms, it can usher in a new era of storytelling. An era that’s largely written by women.