Hollywood isn't in the market for original movies or TV shows, so Marvel's Jessica Jones star Krysten Ritter is creating her own as books first

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No, you haven't been imagining things for the past decade: Hollywood is really cautious about developing original stories now. Since the mid-2010s, there has been an explosion of remakes of older movies, franchise sequels and spinoffs, book adaptations, and much more. Hell, Prime Video even made two seasons of a show based on Aaron Mahnke's popular nonfiction podcast, Lore. Halfway through the 2020s now, it's clear that Hollywood has every intention to keep developing projects based on existing intellectual property - even if original films like Sinners are killing it at the box office. 

At the LA Times's Festival of Books, actress Krysten Ritter, best known for her role as the titular heroine in Marvel's Jessica Jones, shed light on why she has made the pivot from acting to writing novels.

"Many years ago, there was a big shift in the business where all of a sudden, you couldn't just go in and pitch original ideas anymore," Ritter began. "Everything has to be proven, existing IP - whether it's a book, or a title, or a product... I had an idea for Bonfire, my first book, and it was an idea that I wanted to go out and sell as a TV show, and my agent was like, 'Oh let's focus on your other ideas, Bonfire's probably going to be hard to sell, and it would be better if it was existing IP.' And I just had this scrappy, ridiculous, psychotic idea: 'well, what if it was existing IP?' And then I launched into the process of writing Bonfire."

Since the end of Jessica Jones in 2019, all of Ritter's movie & TV projects have been "existing IP" - be it Max's Love & Death (based on a true story), El Camino (a Breaking Bad spinoff), Netflix's Nightbooks (based on a children's book), the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie, the Orphan Black spinoff Echoes, as well as the upcoming Dexter sequel, Resurrection.

Last month, Ritter's second novel, The Retreat, was released. She co-wrote it with Lindsay Jamieson, and it tells the story of a female con artist who embeds herself within the life of a wealthy socialite. Ritter has also recorded the audiobook for The Retreat, which she didn't do for her first novel, Bonfire. During her panel at Festival of Books, Ritter noted that she wrote The Retreat with the intention of being able to "reverse-engineer" it for a TV adaptation. The actress stated that there is interest within Hollywood to adapt her novel to the screen. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.