Hollywood is officially in its adaptation era, and Prime Video is sprinting at the front of the pack. From studio slates to festival line‑ups, the industry is banking hard on stories that already live on our shelves, feeds and fandom forums — and that’s exciting, but I can’t help but wonder about what this means for the future of storytelling.
Amazon started as a place to buy books, and now its streaming arm is leaning right back into that history via YA and romance adaptations, BookTok favourites and Wattpad‑fuelled fandoms. Prime Video’s current YA push is stacked with titles that began as novels, fan‑beloved series or online stories. This definitely isn’t a fleeting moment, it’s a core part of how they see their future.
When Prime Video flew PEDESTRIAN.TV to Obsessed Fest, their new YA‑centric convention, the whole weekend felt like a test case for that approach. The panels and activations were built around Off Campus, The Devil’s Mouth, Your Fault: London, Overcompensating, Maxton Hall and more, with authors and actors positioned as the faces of a broader “fandom first” vision. If you grew up reading these book and have made binging these shows your entire personality like me, it was the dream lineup.
Safe to say I was obsessed. (Image: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Prime Video)
As part of the weekend, media attended a panel with Prime Video execs Peter Friedlander (Head of Global TV at Amazon MGM Studios), Kelly Day (VP of International), Sarah Schechter (who is a producer), Courtney Valenti (Head of Film: Theatrical and Streaming) and Nicole Clemens (Head of International Originals).
The group made it clear that they were as obsessed with their titles as we are and there is an emphasis on pre‑existing communities: books, video games, graphic novels, comics, manga, Wattpad, Goodreads. The Summer I Turned Pretty was their gateway and now basically every corner of culture where fans have already done the groundwork of falling in love with a story, they want in.
My Shaylas!!!! (Image: The Summer I Turned Pretty / Instagram)
A few phrases really stuck with me from the panel. Clemens talked about seeing the audience “not as a marketing channel, but a development partner”, while Friedlander said they knew fans “as readers before viewers”.
They said that they’re obsessed with the audience, they know when they’ve got it wrong, and they want Prime Video to feel like it’s in community with the people who champion these stories. It was honestly really nice hearing YA fans (mostly young women and queer readers) spoken about in that kind of serious, intentional way.
The speed of the pipeline was another big theme. They mentioned Yesteryear, a book developed with Anne Hathaway and brought to Prime Video prior to being published, a story literally moving from idea to adaptation before it’s had a chance to sit on a bookstore shelf.
Red, White & Royal Blue has already spawned Red, White & Royal Wedding, expanding a beloved romance into an ongoing screen universe before the second book even comes out. You can feel how fast they want that page‑to‑screen movement to be, before the next big BookTok moment passes them by.
There were also hints at where they go next. The execs talked about seeing the success of titles like Obsessed and Backrooms and looking more seriously at horror, and at one point they casually dropped that Kevin Bacon is involved in an upcoming project. They didn’t give much away, but I feel like you don’t just name‑check Kevin Bacon for no reason, so I had to mention it. Overall they signalled that this YA wave isn’t going to be just soft romance and campus drama, it’s opening up space for genre and darker edges too.
Still, when I looked at the Obsessed Fest line‑up, I couldn’t ignore the imbalance. Overcompensating was one of the only truly original shows getting much oxygen, apart from Elle, although it already has an existing fanbase of Legally Blonde fans. Most of the excitement was wrapped around adaptations or extensions of worlds that already have readers attached.
We’ve spent years trapped in sequels, reboots and superhero spin‑offs, and this book‑adaptation boom feels like a step up from that in some ways — the stories are coming from authors building huge, mostly female readerships online, not from boardroom‑designed franchises. But it’s hard not to worry about what that does to risk‑taking and new voices that don’t arrive with a giant fandom attached.
There’s also the reality that Prime Video exists under Amazon, which exists under Jeff Bezos. Whatever you think of him, his track record on power, politics and gender isn’t shiny considering he’s spent the last few years getting closer to Donald Trump and the broader ecosystem around him.
Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez at Donald Trump’s innauguration. (Image: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
So while Hollywood is finally carving out space for stories centred on girls, women and queer communities and taking fangirls, book lovers and Wattpad veterans seriously, some of the money and influence backing all this is still tied up in systems that don’t show up for those same people.
That’s where my brain keeps looping back. I’m genuinely thrilled to see the books I love getting big‑budget adaptations and entire conventions built around them.
I’ve literally watched Off Campus four times (and counting) and will be there watching Yesteryear, The Summer I Turned Pretty movie and Red, White & Royal Wedding with the rest of BookTok, because these stories absolutely do matter to me.
But I’m also sitting with the uncomfortable question of whether, by pouring our time, money and attention into this ecosystem, we’re strengthening a machine that ultimately doesn’t answer to us or to the communities whose stories it’s now so keen to sell back to us.
Lead image: Prime Video
