Among the Disney Lucasfilm Press books Jedi Bibliothek discovered earlier this week was one called ‘Telegraph Hill Movie Junior Novel,’ which the full Edelweiss listing reveals is “A junior novel tie-in to the film, Star Wars: Episode VII.” It’s set to release December 22, 2015 – the first Tuesday after The Force Awakens’ December 18th release. Granted, this is only the junior novelization, but could the adult novelization come out on the same date? It seems likely.
During the prequels, the novelizations – and other tie-in books – often appeared shortly before the movie release, which meant spoilers galore. Nothing is going to stop spoilers coming out before the actual film – the merchandise will simply have passed through too many hands for things not to leak – but at least the actual books may be hard to get hold of.
Thinking about this, I believe any adult novelisation could prove slighlty problematic, especially for the Story Group. Given that for visual media (films, TV, etc) canon is now only what is seen on screen, so any novelisation for TFA that “expands” the story beyond what is seen on screen, especially what characters are thinking or discussions not on-screen regarding “the Force”, would mean that those scenes unique to the novelisation would have to be classed as Legends. But no new Legends stories are supposed to be published,
So, would an adult novelisation therefore just be a scene-by-scene retell with no embelishment by its author? who would buy such a novel? just how short would it be? and wouldn’t that resemble more a kids adaptation?…
Junior books shouldn’t be so problematic as they are usually scene-by-scene adaptations with no added material. The same could also be applied to a comic adaptation.
Well, I’m not going to discount theories that there won’t be (an adult) novelization at all. Maybe there won’t be!
But all your reasonings are the whole reason the story group exists. That’s exactly the kind of thing they’re there to handle, as I understand it.
However, I have to wonder if folks forget just how unremarkable most of the previous novelizations were, and how little they actually told us beyond what’s onscreen. Stover’s Revenge of the Sith is a complete and total outlier. The first two PT and all the OT novels were as by-the-book as it came, tiny little quirks like ducks and Owen being Obi-wan’s brother aside.
I hope that we get a Stover or Stover-quality novelization, but I don’t really expect that that’s what we’ll get.