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Words to Screen Pipeline
Which author has the most literary adaptations?
Everyone loves when one of their favorite books is made into a film that does the story justice. There are countless adaptations of books that, when made into a film or television series, the charm, energy, or intricacy of the original work is lost. Still, when done well, it can be like experiencing the story for the first time all over again.
Some of the most famous adaptations of novels are films like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)—both of which won multiple Academy Awards. Then there are stories like Les Misérables, which has had more adaptations than you can keep track of; there's been stage productions, a musical, multiple films and TV miniseries, and even a Japanese anime series.
But which authors have had the most adaptations of their work made?
It might be an easy guess, but the author with the most adaptations of their work is the one and only William Shakespeare—whose writings have been made into over one thousand different films or series, as noted by
Guinness World Records in 2016. It makes sense since he lived and died hundreds of years before filmmaking began and, therefore, has always had a large body of work ripe for adaptation.
But still, the staggering number of projects based on his plays shows how timeless the stories are. You can find films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, like Romeo and Juliet in 1968, all the way up to The Tragedy of Macbeth, which was released for streaming on Apple TV+ in 2021. There have even been successful modern-day interpretations of his work, like She's the Man (2006), based on
Twelfth Night.
Agatha Christie comes in second place with a drastically lesser number of adaptations. There are soon to be 49 adaptations of her work from as far back as The Passing of Mr. Quinn in 1928, up until this year with A Haunting in Venice, which comes to theaters next month. Additionally, she had Agatha Christie's Poirot, which had 70 episodes produced across 24 years, and Agatha Christie's Marple, which had 23 episodes made over nine years.
Stephen King comes in third with close to 40 adaptations of his work from Carrie (in both 1976 and 2013), The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Green Mile (1999), It (2017 and Chapter Two in 2019), and the upcoming Salem's Lot.
Rounding out the list of authors with the most adaptations are John Grisham, Ian Fleming, J.K. Rowling, Nicholas Sparks, Ian McEwan, John le Carré, and Dean Koontz.
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