Movies like Where the Crawdads Sing

Why it's similar — Jason Reitman's Joyce Maynard adaptation pairs an isolated woman with a man whose backstory the town has decided about before she meets him, and Reitman shoots the rural-American summer setting with the same patient regard for landscape Newman gives the Carolina marsh. Both films are credited as crime stories but operate as romances under suspicion, and both rely on a courtroom-sized question about who the woman is allowed to love.

Why it's similar — The Nicholas Sparks adaptation imports the same coastal-South-romance grammar Crawdads operates inside — the small-town gossip, the protective male partner, the watery photogenic backdrop — and pairs it with a thriller subplot that Newman's film handles with more restraint. Audiences who finish Crawdads and want another coastal-trauma romance will find Safe Haven the closest direct cousin.

Why it's similar — The Colleen Hoover adaptation runs on the same Hello Sunshine-adjacent literary-bestseller-to-film pipeline that brought Crawdads to screens, and it operates on the same beat — a young woman holding a secret about a death that the surrounding adults are determined to misread. The reveal architecture rhymes directly.

Why it's similar — The Wattpad-to-film romance shares the slow-burn, two-suitor structure Newman uses for Tate and Chase, where one boy represents care and the other represents control. After plays the dynamic for a younger audience and a college setting, but the central choice the heroine has to make about which kind of love she will accept overlaps cleanly.

Why it's similar — Peter Jackson's Alice Sebold adaptation handles a young woman's death and the slow-motion investigation around it in a register that overlaps with Newman's: small-town American violence, a victim whose interior life the film insists on, and an antagonist whose social respectability is the actual barrier to justice. The supernatural framing is the major divergence.