The Literary Backlist Becomes Hollywood’s New Creative Playground
Hollywood has never been shy about mining the classics, with adaptations of old books remaining staples of film and TV, alongside titles such as Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird and Little Women. As The Hollywood Reporter noted in its Beyond the Book column, an elite wave of showrunners and screenwriters are digging into the public domain to secure free intellectual property without touching the traditional playbook.
Instead of relying on modern updates, these creators are leaving original fictional universes entirely intact while completely rebuilding the psychology of the characters living inside them. That strategy is driving a massive slate of classic adaptations across screens this year, spanning Christopher Nolan taking on Homer’s The Odyssey, Emerald Fennell adapting Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and high-profile television series tackling Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Steinbeck, Austen and Dickens provide name recognition and a built-in audience, offering what Sense and Sensibility screenwriter Diana Reid terms free IP.
Zoe Kazan Reclaims East of Eden on Netflix
For showrunner Zoe Kazan, the path to adapting John Steinbeck’s 1952 family saga started when she was just 15 years old. Somebody has to put the thing on screen that I see in my head,
she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Working on the adaptation forced Kazan to re-examine Steinbeck’s Cathy.
Daniel West Builds a Taut Thriller Out of Dickens
Over at MGM+, screenwriter Daniel West took a radically different structural approach to Charles Dickens. Alongside star and executive producer Kit Harington, West spent roughly a decade discussing how to adapt A Tale of Two Cities, noting that the 1859 novel had not received a major screen adaptation in nearly 40 years, having been done frequently in the first half of the 20th century before it petered out.
He changed the characterization of Lucie Manette, moving her away from the heroine found in the text, and worked alongside a cast that includes Sydney Carton played by Kit Harington and Lucie played by Mirren Mack. Dickens’ book centers on a couple, but West wanted to intensify that
and twist it slightly into much more of a triangle and make it more live and more complex
among those characters. You don’t need to spoon-feed the audience the modernity of it,
West says, noting that the story focuses on a disenfranchised, broken society pushing back to a crisis point. Viewers can watch the resulting tension play out across episodes that stream directly on the platform.
Diana Reid Finds Humor and Humanity in Austen
Focus Features took a similar scalpel to Jane Austen with its new version of Sense and Sensibility. Screenwriter Diana Reid leaned directly into Austen’s original text, describing her approach as respect rather than reverence.
Reid notes that these texts offer a comforting kind of deep connection for modern audiences who feel fatigued by surface-level interactions. By letting sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood—played by Esmé Creed-Miles and Daisy Edgar-Jones—each grow into a bit of the other, the production prioritized emotional honesty over cheap contemporary gimmicks. Reid acknowledges it is an honor to be part of such a big catalog because it doesn’t need to be definitive,
knowing she will not be the last to take on Austen.
