The Book That Was Going to Be a Historic Bomb Is Now Apparently Going to Be a Movie

The critics were wrong. Simple as that.

Ten days ago, multiple outlets competed to be first with the take that MrBeast and James Patterson had produced a generational publishing disaster. 'Historic bomb' was a phrase that actually appeared in print. People wrote this confidently, with sources, with presale data. They published it.

According to the A.V. Club, 'The Most Dangerous Games' sold well enough that there are now conversations about film rights. Not 'better than expected.' Well enough that Hollywood is calling. The same book that was eulogized before it shipped debuted at No. 3 on the NYT bestseller list and is apparently being optioned before the month is out.

This is not a defense of MrBeast or the book, which this correspondent has not read. This is about the epistemics of presale data as a predictive instrument for a creator with 500 million subscribers who runs a million-dollar contest tied to the purchase. Of course the presales looked weird. The audience was being told to buy the book for a chance to win a million dollars, not because they were already aware of it through traditional retail channels. Applying standard publishing benchmarks to that situation was always going to produce garbage analysis.

The people who wrote the bomb takes had data. They also had a framework that did not fit the subject. That is the more expensive mistake.

Film rights conversations mean nothing on their own. Most optioned books never become films. The Hollywood interest here is probably less about the novel's literary qualities and more about the MrBeast brand as a marketing infrastructure for any adaptation. That is worth being clear-eyed about. But it is also a completely different problem from the one being loudly predicted nine days ago.

The September that was supposed to bury the book is going to end with the book in development. History will note that the presale analysts did not cover themselves in glory.