Over the last few years, the Oscar for best adapted screenplay has been dominated by well-executed transformations of gripping fiction. Last year’s winner, Conclave writer Peter Straughan—which turned a high-end airport novel into a delectably cinematic thriller—is a veteran of the form, previously winning awards for screenplays based on the work of John le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall). So is 2023 champ Sarah Polley, whose Oscar for Women Talking came after she earned raves for adapting Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace) and Alice Munro (Away From Her).
This year’s category should be no different. We’ve got films based on fiction by modern masters including Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon, as well as classics by Mary Shelley and Ibsen, coming from a range of lauded directors like Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein) and Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another). As discussed on this week’s episode of the Little Gold Men book club (listen below), we’ve also got Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao returning to the prestige space with her take on one of the best novels of the past decade, Hamnet—with a screenplay she cowrote with the book’s author, Maggie O’Farrell (who also joined the podcast this week).
Hamnet centers on Agnes and William Shakespeare in the late 16th century, tracking their early courtship as well as the period following the tragic death of their eponymous 11-year-old son due to the bubonic plague. Agnes is our protagonist, the story unfurling as a richly textured portrait of her inner life and the powerful force of grief that hovers around her every move. The film’s cast is stacked with Oscar nominees: Agnes is played by Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), while Paul Mescal (Aftersun) portrays her famous husband. Emily Watson also stars as Mr. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary.
The film will mark new territory for Zhao, who previously adapted Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland and worked on the comics-based script for Marvel’s divisive Eternals. She’s not alone in that. Nia DaCosta will introduce her take on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Toronto International Film Festival; it stars Tessa Thompson and, in a gender-flipped role, Nina Hoss. DaCosta made a name for herself with her vivid Candyman sequel, and like Zhao, tried her hand at Marvel. Hedda will be her first adaptation not defined by box-office-proven IP, but rather by the esteem of its source material.
Guillermo del Toro is also taking on a literary classic, though this has become a more familiar move for him. His last feature, Pinocchio, returned to the roots of the Carlo Collodi 1883 novel and delivered a darkly moving version of a beloved story; it went on to win the Oscar for best animated feature. He also recently took on the ’40s noir Nightmare Alley. But it feels like he’s been working up to his Frankenstein movie his whole career. He recently described the monster epic, starring Jacob Elordi and Oscar Isaac, as his bucket-list film to Vanity Fair: “I’ve been doing movies for 30 years. I’m not going to be alive for 30 [more] years, I don’t think.”
This year’s literary Oscar race won’t stop there. Fresh off of their Oscar-nominated Sing Sing script, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are back with the intimate epic Train Dreams, drawing from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella about a railroad laborer plunged into a deep grief through the 1920s in the American West. Paul Thomas Anderson will return with another chewy, singular Thomas Pynchon adaptation—his last one, Inherent Vice, netted him a best-adapted-screenplay nomination, and hopes are high for One Battle After Another, said to be loosely taken from Pynchon’s wild Vineland. The Cannes Film Festival also launched a few starry adaptations of recent fiction, including The History of Sound, based on Ben Shattuck’s short story (he also wrote the screenplay) and starring Mescal and Josh O’Connor, and Die My Love, based on Ariana Harwicz’s novel and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.
Finally, later this month, Little Gold Men’s book club will return to discuss Ballad of a Small Player, featuring a screenplay by Rowan Joffé that is based on the 2011 novel by Lawrence Osborne. The movie is directed by Edward Berger—who just so happened to helm last year’s Conclave, the reigning adapted-screenplay champ. In case things needed to get just that much more competitive.
