A Quiet Place: Day One begins with a bang, quite literally. When the ailing Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and her hospice group are brought on an outing to New York City, they are at ground zero for an invasion of bloodthirsty aliens who land in a fiery shower of meteors. What isn’t destroyed by the meteors are ripped apart by the aliens, who immediately begin to attack anything that makes noise.

It’s a spectacular, horrifying opening setpiece — one that was promised, after all, in the title of the film itself: Day One.

A prequel to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, Day One lives up to its premise of showing the first 24 hours of an alien invasion that kicks off a silent apocalypse where humans live in fear of monsters with super-sensitive hearing. But once the dust settles and an eerie quiet sets in over the city, Day One transforms into a truly singular blockbuster movie that sheds the immersive spectacle of the first movie in favor of something more tender and wistful.

When Charlotte Bonner saw Barbie last summer, she was blown away by how much the film spoke to her. “It was very motivational,” says Bonner, a marketing assistant and book blogger in Gloucestershire, England. “The themes were very poignant for the time that was going on.”

An avid reader, Bonner likes to annotate books with different colored pens and highlighters. While watching Barbie, she remembers thinking to herself, “This is something I could annotate quite a lot in.”

A few months later, she got her wish. In December, Faber & Faber published the Barbie screenplay as a 138-page paperback, with full-color photos and a new introduction by the film’s co-writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. “I went round to all the bookshops and just happened to find it,” Bonner recalls. Meanwhile, in a real-life literary Barbenheimer, her father bought the Oppenheimer screenplay — also via Faber & Faber, which has published most of Christopher Nolan’s screenplays since 2001’s Memento. “He’s very much a history person, and he likes to read a lot,” Bonner says of her dad.

Increasingly, blockbuster movies aren’t just making an impact at the box office or on streaming. They’re resonating at bookstores, too, many of which prominently displayed the Barbie and Oppenheimer screenplays last year as though they were buzzy new novels. The sales seem to justify this strategy.