Cynthia Ayala // Blog Writer
by Kate Brian
For years, novels have been getting second lives on the big screen. Now, another Young Adult bestselling series is joining the club. Make way for Private, the 14-novel-long, bestselling series by Kate Brian, which follows one Reed Brennan as she enters a boarding school that contains hidden dangers.
This wouldn’t be the first time that the Private series has been adapted to the screen. Private was once made into a 20 episode web series back in 2009, which was later compressed into a one and a half hour long movie. The web series covered the series’ first arc comprised of Private, Invitation Only, Untouchable, and Confessions. Needless to say, Alloy Entertainment took many liberties with the adaptation and the result left it dull. They missed the mark in trying to compress 4 novels into 20 15-minute episodes, sacrificing a lot of character development and relationships. The first thing wrong was that the casting was off. It had notable celebrities such as Kelsey Sanders, Tristin Mays, Chord Overstreet and Brant Daugherty. But the problem was they didn’t fit the characters, or just didn’t understand the characters. There was also a lack of chemistry between the actors that made watching it just awkward.
Second, compressing the story, compressing four books into one thing, means that a lot – between character dynamics and story development – is going to be lost if not done right. When you have two elements that are so essential for adaptation go so wrong, it’s not going to be good. Here’s hoping Warner Bros., who acquired the film rights, will be able to remedy everything that was wrong in the web-series.
But the real question: will it even work?
The Private series is a long series that contains 2 prequel novels and 6 spin-off novels. So there’s a lot of material here that is going to get lost in movie adaptations. Sometimes books can work so well as a TV series, and done right, Private can do that because one of the challenges is making sure that the important part of the novels aren’t lost like they were in the web-series. Maybe fans can just chock it up to poor adapting, but condensing 4 books into one movie, it’s not going to work out too well.
Now, it’s unclear how Stacy Rukeyser, a writer and executive producer on Lifetime’s breakout series UnREAL, will adapt the franchise, or how Warner Bros. will want to adapt it. They could adapt 2 books into a movie, or they could scrap it all together and go with the TV show idea. But what they should make sure is that they do it the right way. Personally, I’m in favor of the TV show route because that would allow it to incorporate the prequels and the spin-offs while creating a cohesive show.
But as of right now, we don’t know much about the project other than the fact that Alloy’s own Les Morgenstein from Vampire Diaries and Elysa Dutton from Idiocracy will be producing the project.