Coming of page: Why every YA book you’ve read is being turned into a movie

The best book-to-screen adaptations these days are all Young Adult titles. How did growing up become the creative secret sauce?

Every time a book-to-film adaptation comes out, the reaction is the same. Excitement. Mild outrage. Someone inevitably typing, “the book was better” in the comments. And yet, Young Adult novels continue their steady march from bedside tables to cinema screens. From Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and Colleen Hoover’s Verity, to Sunrise on the Reaping and My Oxford Year, everything’s jumping to the screen. Clearly, we are not done watching complicated people fall in love, make questionable decisions, and stare thoughtfully into the distance.

YA stories such as The Summer I Turned Pretty are now mainstream successes.

It’s no surprise that YA has a better track record on screen than most other genres. “Current YA fiction strikes a balance between guilty pleasure and good viewing. Even if the plot isn’t realistic, the characters are,” says Sanika Santosh Rangnekar, 26, founder of a Mumbai-based book club.

Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis is being turned into a movie.

My Oxford Year is about confused young people who don’t know if they’re in love. People love it.

It explains the genre’s staying power, says Anahita Karthik, 24, Mumbai-based author of Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar, whose Tamil vampire romance was featured in the anthology My Big Fat Desi Wedding. A good adaptation isn’t about visualising 10 key scenes, it’s about being true to a book’s mood and core. It’s why The Hunger Games works both as a film franchise and as an extension of the novels – it was never about just the games.

Besides, with young adults, reading is less a solitary hobby and more a social activity driven by BookTok and Reels. Tears, gasps, frantic endorsements and collective obsession often do more for a book’s visibility than three-paragraph reviews. So, when the adaptations hit the screen, fans aren’t looking for critical commentary, but all the vibes that came from the collective read-throughs.

Netflix’s Mismatched is adapted from Sandhya Menon’s book, When Dimple Met Rishi.

And YA, more than most genres, is chill with representation. No one wants hollow depictions of a brilliant IIT boy or a demure girl with “milky skin” in a pink kurta. Adventure stories allow for feistier characters, love stories flesh out rich inner lives, even love triangles feature more than polar opposites. Their screen adaptations reflect how young people actually experience the world. “We’re seeing more characters of colour, more queer characters, and more nuanced identities,” Karthik says. Consider how many actors in the Percy Jackson TV series are people of colour, while mixed-race Healthcliff from Wuthering Heights was recently played by White Jacob Elordi.

Colleen Hoover’s YA thriller, Verity, is also getting its own movie.

Indian readers love international YA. But books and shows about Indian teenage life are rare. When they do work, they often arrive via an Indian-American lens. Netflix’s Mismatched, adapted from Sandhya Menon’s When Dimple Met Rishi; and Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever centre young people of Indian origin but are shaped for global audiences. As Karthik points out, “There’s a perception that teenage life in India revolves almost entirely around academics, and that limits the kinds of stories the industry believes will work.”

Romance and emotional exploration are often treated as distractions, making locally rooted YA narratives harder to take seriously on screen. The irony is that Indian audiences have already embraced these coming-of-age stories, just not when they are set too close to home.

From HT Brunch, March 07, 2026

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