Off Campus has become the anchor for Amazon Prime Video’s next content bet. The Elle Kennedy adaptation had already been renewed for a second season ahead of its launch, then it opened in May as the streamer’s third most-viewed debut season ever, behind only The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Fallout. The adaptation of Carley Fortune’s novel, Every Year After, followed with a second season after its June start.
New Adult is the in-between lane
The term New Adult emerged in the late 2000s through publisher St. Martin’s Press. It describes stories about characters aged 18 to 29, sitting between YA (12 to 18) and adult fiction. In romance publishing, that age band comes with what the online book community calls “spice”: explicit sex scenes, in contrast with “closed-door” romance where the act is only alluded to.
For Prime Video, the demographic also has a subscription logic. These viewers are old enough for adult storylines but often not yet paying for their own Prime Video or Amazon Prime account. At the same time, characters in some of these books skew older, which gives the slate a line to millennial women who already subscribe.
“I think the 30s are particularly interesting… The stakes go higher,” author Carley Fortune said in the Deadline interview.
The slate Amazon is building
- Rose Hill: Elsie Silver’s four-book contemporary romance series, starting with Wild Love. Sean O’Pry, Hannah Galway, Jake Weary and Sadie Dickerson are already cast for the first two books.
- Things We Never Got Over: Lucy Score’s Knockemout trilogy, led by Molly Griggs, Tommy Martinez and Matthew Noszka, with Sarah Jeffery and Sean Teale cast in later-book roles.
- Film side: Amazon MGM Studios has optioned Ana Huang’s Gods of the Game trilogy and Lauren Asher’s Throttled, and is adapting the dark romance Butcher & Blackbird.
The playbook: seed the sequels early
Prime Video is not waiting for a single season to prove out. On Off Campus, the romantic arcs of the four hockey teammates were planted from the beginning, and the same pattern is being repeated on Rose Hill and Things We Never Got Over. Peter Friedlander, Head of Global TV at Amazon MGM Studios, summed up the dynamic as “One success begets another.”
That franchise infrastructure matters because these titles share a common publisher—Bloom Books—and a fan culture that generates social media edits. Amazon’s head of marketing for studios, Sue Kroll, has said she stays up late watching those edits, which are likely to multiply as the New Adult slate arrives.
Why media teams should track this
Amazon is not alone. Netflix has lined up adaptations including Carley Fortune’s This Summer Will Be Different, Shawn Levy’s Chestnut Springs series and Ana Huang’s Twisted Love. Apple TV+ won rights to Rebecca Yarros’s upcoming Peculiar Stars, while Hulu’s attempt at Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses reverted to the author.
The takeaway for media planners and entertainment marketers is that romance IP is becoming a subscription acquisition tool, not just a programming niche. A Luminate report cited in Deadline says women-led stories remain undersupplied in film and television, which makes this an open lane for streamers that can convert book fandom into repeat viewing.
Source: Deadline
