This book has examined a range of ‘raw material’ and its film adaptation, from nineteenth-century novels to late-twentieth-century prose fiction to an Inuit Traditional Story. Film adaptation demonstrates the desire on the part of both those who tell stories and their audiences to return to the same material, reimagining it. Who reimagines it, how and for whom, have been key questions throughout this study. Some of these reimaginings, as we have seen, have been pointedly politicised; others have downplayed the political implications of the texts they have adapted. At least part of an adaptation's audience is unlikely to be familiar with the source material in the first place; the adaptation may guide viewers to the source, but equally, it may not.

Some of the examples of adaptations in this book involve a temporal gap of more than a century between the source text and the film. But contemporary publishing functions rather differently. Simone Murray's study of the adaptation industry observes how, so imbricated has publishing become in film adaptation, that adaptation ‘is now factored in and avidly pursued from the earliest phases of book production’ (2012, 13). The novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens (2019), the source material for Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit (2019), presents a striking example of this phenomenon insofar as the author thanks Waititi in the novel's acknowledgements (Leunens 2019, 297). Further, the film, clearly in production prior to the publication of the novel, presents some considerable differences from its near-simultaneous source text, including the infusion of humour, the dramatisation of Hitler as imagined by Jojo, and the temporal span of the narrative: Jojo takes mere days to confess to Elsa that the war has ended in the film; whereas in the novel, his ruse continues for years, and he even smuggles Elsa, unaware of the possibility of her own freedom, out of his house and into another flat under the guise that her life, as a Jewish woman, remains endangered, even in 1949. What may be an understandable and pitiable (because brief) deception on the part of a German boy in the film is monstrous in the novel as Jojo ages, his first-person narration revealing the extent of his deluded self-deception and justification for continuing to hold Elsa prisoner while insisting on his status as her protector.