This is the question Esquire is asking, with all the great literary adaptations hitting the silver screen lately (Fantastic Mister Fox, Where the Wild Things Are, The Road, etc).
From the piece...
Look at who's converting some of these titles for the screen. Jonze adapted Wild Things alongside novelist Dave Eggers, whose fantastical revisionism both owed to and grew from Sendak's slender storybook. Its young hero is the product of a broken home representing not only divorce and alienation, but also the enduring battle between those who take control of their imagination and those who would sooner outsource it to Disney or, worse yet, Hasbro. The acclaimed author Nick Hornby addressed a similar fissure in his script for An Education, based on Lynn Barber's coming-of-age memoir about a girl who suffers the consequences of mistaking affect for sophistication. It's easily the same accusation you could level at the "minds" who reinvented films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left, atmospheric '70s masterpieces that refused to do their audiences' thinking for them.
Those were the days, and the adaptation boom is part of a concerted creative effort to reclaim them — a chance for nice guys like Eggers and Hornby to break through and beat Hollywood at its own derivative game. It's not a fluke, either; novelist Larry McMurtry probably struck the first blow four years ago with the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Adapting Annie Proulx's short story, he and co-writer Diana Ossana won Academy Awards for penning American cinema's most mainstream gay drama to date. Two of the next three years' Best Picture Oscar winners were book adaptations as well — hardly a new phenomenon, but one that made ultimate insiders out of inveterate iconoclasts like Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country For Old Men) and Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), who compromised neither their sources nor their styles in maneuvering to the top. Peter Jackson they weren't.
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