Some of the greatest movies of all time don't start out as half-completed screenplays in a writer's drawer. Frequently, they actually start out as books. From hardcover best-sellers to dog-eared paperbacks, novelists have given countless screenwriters in Hollywood the bones of a story to reinterpret and reshape into a more visu🎶al medium. With some of the most beloved movies of all time originating as books, it's safe to say it's a process that audiences are more than familiar with. A lot of best-sellers become hit movies, but which classic novels have made the greatest movies?
The practice of adapting movies from literary works is as old as movies itself. In 1910, the silent movie Frankenstein adapted Mary Shelley's hit novel, being among the first movies to adapt a piece of literary fiction. A few years later, German filmmaker F.W. Murnꦦau failed to secure the rights to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, prompting him to make his unauthorized adaptation under a different title: Nosferatu.
The practice of cinematic adaptations of novels continued throughout the 20th century. In modern times, film producers actively seek out the rights to books, as the logic dictates that a book with a built-in audience means all tho🌄se readers are would-be moviegoers, all eager to see how the movie gets the book "right."
Spanning genres from crime to horror to romantic come🐟dies and mor🍨e, these are 35 classic movies that are based on novels.
35. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Before making her debut as a novelist, magazine writer Lauren Weisberger spent nearly a year working as an assistant to Vogue ♌editor Anna Wintour. Later, Weisberger mined the experience to write The Devil Wears Prada, a roman à clef about an outsider to the fashion industry who gets a front-row, top-level seat working directly under one of its most prolific (and overbearing) titans. In 2006, Weisberger's book became a hit movie with Anne Hathaway in the lead role and Meryl Streep in her now-iconic performance as cutthroat boss Miranda Priestly.
33. Gone Girl (2014)
After getting laid off from Entertainment Weekly where she worked as a TV critic, writer Gillian Flynn leveraged her skillset to authoring fiction. In 2012, her psychological thriller Gone Girl became a massive hit, inspiring an acclaimed movie adaptation from 💯director David Fincher and starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. Both the movie and Flynn'sไ novel follows a seemingly perfect married couple whose interior lives are on the fritz. Eventually, husband Nick (played in the movie by Affleck) is a key suspect in the disappearance of his wife Amy (Pike). Full of twists and pregnant with suspense, Gone Girl is a true classic of the 2010s, a dark story that underscored the uneasy zeitgeist and the complexities of modern day marriage.
32. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
The mysterious and elusive author Patrick O'Brian, who died in 2000, left behind 20 whole novels in his Aubrey-🀅Maturin series – books set during the Napoleonic Wars that chronicle the friendship between Royal Navy shipmates. However, only one of these seafaring epics made it to screen: 1969's Master and Commander, adapted to a mega-budget 2003 blockbuster Master and Commander: The 💃Far Side of the World starring Russell Crowe. While the movie grossed a whopping $212 million worldwide, the movie never became a franchise that lived up to the scale of O'Brian's books.
31. The Hunger Games Series (2012 - 2015)
One night while channing surfing, author Suzanne Collins was struck by the contrast of seeing reality TV competitions and news footage of the Iraq War. The juxtaposition led to her writing The Hunger Games, the first in a major hit ▨book series that remapped the parameters of contemporary young adult fiction. Set in a dystopian future ruled by a totalitarian government, young children are randomly selecte✱d from across districts to compete in a televised battle royale called "The Hunger Games." The books inspired a major film franchise by Lionsgate, which in turn made Jennifer Lawrence – in the lead role of cunning, resilient protagonist Katniss Everdeen – into a new Hollywood "it" girl.
30. Battle Royale (2000)
Battle ꦉRoyale, both Koushun Takami's one and only novel from 1999 and its acclaimed film adaptation from 2000 (directed by Kinji Fukasaku), are intertwined as seminal works of fiction that not only defined unique Japanese anxieties at the turn of the century but influenced all of popular culture. Set in a futuristic fascist Japan, both versions of the story chronicle a class of randomly-selected high school students who are kidnapped by the government and forced to fight to the death on a remote island. Controversial for its graphic violence but renowned as smart social and political commentary, Battle Royale is synonymous with last man standing, winner-takes-all epics and even an entire genre of video games.
29. John Carter (2012)
Disney had high hopes for John Carter in 2012. Eager to find a new evergreen franchise in the spirit of Pirates♌ of the Caribbean, the studio nabbed the rights to Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter and the Princess of Mars, published in 1912. (Although the book is in public domain, the name "John Carter" is still property of the Burroughs estate.) The story follows a Confederate veteran,🦩 John Carter, who winds up on the planet Mars and gets embroiled in an alien civil war as well as a romance with the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris. While Andrew Stanton's movie was acclaimed by critics and audiences, the movie flopped hard at the box office, becoming one of Disney's biggest disasters.
