By Hien Bui
With the adaptation and release of “After,” moviegoers watched the classic boy-meets-girl story play out on the big screen while industry professionals gauged the potential of Wattpad stories. “After” had started as a Harry Styles fanfiction but it gained enough notoriety to transcend the online publishing platform and receive a subsequent publishing deal. From there, a movie adaptation followed.
Wattpad, which had already been a place for publishers to find stories, might now become the source of movie plots for Hollywood studios.
The success of “The Kissing Booth” and “After,” movies that have been serialized from stories first posted on the platform, are examples of the successful transition between the site to larger audiences.
It may be a stretch to say that the next blockbuster could come from Wattpad, but the site’s unexpected, meteoric rise from a storytelling platform to a resource for the entertainment industry is undeniable. Although all it’s churned out so far are romance movies geared primarily at a teenage audience, the variety of stories found on Wattpad lead to expectations for more genres being serialized and released to the general audience.
The app is rapidly changing to accommodate this new demand for its original content. Wattpad has recently added a publishing division devoted to sourcing out remarkable stories that deserve life in print or on the screen.
Wattpad’s analytics, algorithms and built-in audience, as opposed to editors or publishers, will filter out potential screen successes from the millions of stories uploaded by users everyday. It’s this type of selection that is expected to turn out the likes of the aforementioned movies and the Hulu original “Light as a Feather,” stories that had huge pre-existing fanbases that flocked to support their releases.
Wattpad’s breakthrough into digital media comes from many years of cultivating a community and helping creators monetize their work. What had once been an internet community for reading and sharing stories could now become a legitimate source of content for TV, film or books.
