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An original BookTok relic The Midnight Library is being revived nearly six years after its film rights were sold. Florence Pugh will produce and star as the novel’s main character, Nora Seed, a woman who finds herself in a library between life and death and who reads alternative realities of her own life in the library’s vast catalog.
The Midnight Library was published August 13, 2020 and was a part of the first wave of #BookTok favorites alongside titles like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Song of Achilles, and It Ends With Us. #BookTok is a TikTok hashtag that became a trend and then a community in 2020, largely due to the pandemic and people trying to find ways to pass the time. Reading became an extremely popular pastime and discussions about novels on the app helped launch many books to commercial success.
Today, The Midnight Library has over 2 million ratings on Goodreads and has prompted author, Matt Haig, to release another “Midnight World” novel published May 26 titled The Midnight Train. That novel is set in the same world as The Midnight Library and follows main character Wilbur on his honeymoon with his love interest Maggie but then he “gives it all away” and “wishes he could go back and live differently.” Goodreads describes it as “a magical time-traveling love story.”
The Midnight Library was predicted to be one of the biggest deals to come out of the Cannes film festival and producers were approached by multiple studios, but where the movie will end up and for how much is still unknown.
Florence Pugh’s previously praised performances in Little Women and Midsommar have made her an actress that audiences show up to the theaters to see no matter the project. With her loyal audience and the BookTok readers in place there is potential high anticipation for The Midnight Library’s release.
Previous BookTok-to-movie adaptations that have seen high anticipation from audiences are Colleen Hoover’s novels It Ends With Us and Regretting You. But the reviews for the movies themselves were mixed and the everlasting drama and backlash between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuit about It Ends With Us has shadowed the movies overall success.
The Midnight Library will leverage TikTok anticipation in marketing for the movie, similar to Baldoni’s heavy presence on the app when developing It Ends With Us. It is likely Pugh or other crew members of The Midnight Library will increase their activity on TikTok or even hire movie and book influencers to promote the movie in pursuit of connecting with the original audience that made the novel a successful BookTok staple. This is undoubtedly great news for fans of Pugh’s occasional series of Instagram masterpieces, Cooking With Flo.
Should The Midnight Library movie prove to be as big a success as its bidding war indicates, then new adaptations of Haig’s “Midnight World” novels could follow and create an ongoing franchise of interconnected stories based in this universe. Granted, there is no indication of there being a third “Midnight World” novel yet, but if the movie adaptation is successful Midnight Library adaptation could go a long way towards making “Midnight World” the ultimate BookTok success story.
The post Florence Pugh’s Newest Project Is a BookTok Phenomenon That Could Be the Next Big Thing appeared first on Den of Geek.
