miscellaneous
A famous story adapted in a new setting
O Brother Where Art Thou?
A satire over the Depression-era American South using The Odyssey as a template.
Ran
King Lear but in Sengoku-era japan (featuring elements of Japanese legends surrounding real figures).
Apocalypse Now
Like Heart of Darkness it uses a river journey to highlight the savagery beneath imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, but in South Vietnam and Cambodia instead of the Congo Free State.
Bonus points if the adaptation still keeps the main themes and ideas of the source material AND the influences have been confirmed by the creators.
My wife got (fake) mad at me last week as we were watching an episode of Only Connect and i was like 'oh those are the names of the daughters in Taming of Shrew' and she was like 'HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW THAT!!? I KNOW YOUVE NEVER READ IT' and i hit her with 'yea, but ive seen 10 Things I hate about you several times sooooo...'
Romeo + Juliet
Hamlet
West Side Story
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Waterworld
Gladiator
Chocolat
Edit: Fun is fun, but for those who don’t know, this is from a movie called Orange County: https://youtu.be/08SrnAQb0T0
Prior to this clip, the main character/narrator mentions he has the sneaking suspicion that his English teacher might be illiterate. Hence Waterworld, Gladiator & Chocolat.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is actually a couple layers deep. The movie is an adaptation of the book by Patricia Highsmith. But the book itself is for sure inspired by Macbeth.
I always love films that are modern retellings of Shakespeare plays. 10 Things I Hate About You is my favourite, but Romeo + Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), She's the Man (Twelfth Night), Anyone But You (Much Ado About Nothing) continue the trend
Going all the way back to 'Seven Against Thebes" a Greek play from the 400's bce. People really like making a story of a small group of badasses coming together to stop an army
Get Over It is Midsummer’s Nights Dream, in the film the drama club are practicing it, but the storyline outside of the drama club also follows the Shakespeare play
The New Setting: Mid-1990s Beverly Hills high school culture.
Heckerling confirmed she was hired to write a youth film and immediately realized Austen's Emma a well-meaning, meddlesome heiress who fancies herself a matchmaker mapped perfectly onto wealthy 90s teenagers. Cher Horowitz is Emma Woodhouse, Tai is Harriet Smith, and Josh is Mr. Knightley.
And turning the bookish father who is always reading and has to be reminded to eat by Emma into the workaholic lawyer who has to be reminded to stick to his diet for his blood pressure is the perfect update.
https://giphy.com/gifs/l1IXW4b4830fj1dx6
“Bride and Prejudice” is also a solid adaption of Pride and Prejudice. That’s Darcy and Lizzie in the gif. It was done by Gurinder Chadha, who’s most famous for her movie “Bend It Like Beckham.”
I was just quoting this movie yesterday! My daughter invited a few extra folks to my birthday celebration last-minute. I was worried about having enough food but I figured "if we can just get into the kitchen, rearrange some things, then we can certainly party with the Haiti-ans!"
He didn’t think it was a bad film. He just thought (correctly) that it was a shot for shot remake of Yojimbo without any credit or licensing. It wasn’t subtle, and the courts agreed.
Fun fact, in the scene pictured on the poster, they used real arrows fired by professionals. Some of the arrows were fly by wire, but the terror was real.
In its format basically, its essentially a detective show in the guise of a medical drama, house and sherlock are also both addictive personalities, and Watson and Wilson are fairly obvious parallels
Abed: So you guys are going to "Can't Buy Me Love" me. Britta: We're going to what? Abed: Like the movie "Can't Buy Me Love". You're going to change me from zero to hero, geek to chic. Troy: Oh, he means we're going to "Love Don't Cost a Thing" him. Shirley: Oh! Troy: "Can't Buy Me Love" was the remake for white audiences.
The lion king is the Contendings of Horus and Set with hamlet thrown in. Scar is literally Set: red and black and ruling over the wastes, while Mufasa rules the fertile lands.
I mean, they should have closed shop and gone home after this came out. Not sure anyone can make a more perfect movie. They did everything right; the adaptation, the casting, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the costumes...
And yes, all my theater homies adore this movie. There was a small kerfuffle about like 2 lines being left out but other than that, I hadn't seen any of them, especially the Shakespeare people, praise a movie based on a play like that.
It’s not quite “gun fights”, more like “waving their pistols in each other’s faces”.
I liked the party scene where everyone had to check their weapons at the door and they show the wall of checked in guns. Romeo’s gold PT99 looked cool though.
It’s hilarious because they still call their weapons swords and daggers. In the beginning of the film Lord Montague goes “pass me my longsword!” and he gets handed a fucking shotgun with “Longsword” engraved on it
I genuinely cannot tell if the movie is in on the joke or not. There’s also the part of the film where Romeo is banished from “Verona” and he’s exiled to Mexico. The “apothecary” he gets the final act poison from is a weed grower.
Mercutio remains unchanged.
Edit: There seem to be a lot of people here questioning how I can possibly think the movie is not in on the joke and I use the phrase more rhetorically than literally. I mean it in the sense that the movie plays itself so straight and doesn’t lampshade any of its silliness that it leaves open the possibility that just maybe everyone making it was extremely serious and considered themselves high brow artists and that in itself is part of the joke.
Like how the fuck could that person write about having "longsword" engraved in a shotgun, a deliberate creative choice made by the director and written in the screenplay, and wonder "huh, was that on purpose?"
The movie is very much in on the joke. There's a ton of little eater eggs throughout, like how the pool hall where Romeo and the boys hang out is called The Globe.
It's a surprisingly faithful adaptation in large part because of how they choose to stick to the old language and make it relevant. It's a move as genius as it is silly, but it works really well.
Bumping for his whole Red Curtain trilogy! Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge are the clearer ones, but the (very underrated) first film Strictly Ballroom also started as a theater play originally.
This is considerably before he was considered a comedic actor, so that's quite normal actually! Which is exactly why he was cast the he was for Airplane! and the like
I know no one here will be able to relate, BUT; I once saw a staging of Jesus Christ Superstar set during World War II. One of the greatest productions I’ve ever seen on stage and that includes huge broadway shows in New York. Even though that was over twenty years ago, having the Romans and their accomplices dressed as Nazis and Jesus and his followers as more the French movement pushing against their country’s occupation is clearly relevant today.
Fun fact: When he was offered the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine said he was going to play it dead seriously:
"I'm going to play this movie like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me."
He also later stated that he did it for his then 7 year old daughter because he hadn't done any movies that were appropriate for her and she could watch.
I also really like how thematically it leans on the question of lying. After all, what is more “human”, to always tell the strict truth, or to tell compassionate lies to protect those around you?
If you want to get even wackier with this, although Lies of P is itself a retelling Pinocchio, it is inspired by and even features a reference to Pluto, a retelling of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, itself a retelling of Pinocchio.
A Fistful of Dollars is Yojimbo, which is itself Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
So much so that multiple remakes have had lawsuits filed based on infringements in the stories (Last Man Standing bought the rights to Yojimbo, but had to change its setting to prohibition era gang wars to avoid being sued by Dashiel Hammett)
Tokyo Godfathers, Three men and a Cradle and Ice age 1 are all retelling of The Three Godfathers, which is itself a retelling of The Three Magi in The Bible
The Laurents/Bernstein/Sondheim musical West Side Story (and its 1961 and 2021 film adaptations) was famously adapted from the plot of Romeo and Juliet.
The entire animated Lion King trilogy is inspired by the Shakespearean universe: Lion King is Hamlet, Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride is Romeo & Juliet, and Lion King 1-1/2 is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (play by Tom Stoppard that retells Hamlet from the viewpoint of two minor characters).
Some others: Clueless is a spin on Jane Austen’s Emma; Bridget Jones’s Diary is Pride & Prejudice. Freeway is Little Red Riding Hood. Bedazzled is based on the Faust legend.
Someone else mentioned 10 Things I Hate About You being The Taming of the Shrew; the writing team for that film (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) also adapted Twelfth Night for She’s The Man. Just One of the Guys, from the ‘80s, is also an adaption of Twelfth Night.
eta: Just thought of A Thousand Acres which is a retelling of King Lear, but it’s also an adaption of a book by Jane Smiley that is the film’s settibg so idk if that counts.
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u/GayTrees420 Aug 30 '26
A lot of Shakespeare adaptations could be in this thread, but I'll go with my favorite - 10 Things I Hate About You is based on Taming of the Shrew