Hollywood Returns to the Classics, and Writers Rebuild the Characters Inside Them

Classic literature is having a big year on screen. Zoe Kazan's Netflix limited series East of Eden, Christopher Nolan's take on Homer's The Odyssey, Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and fresh versions of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities are all arriving in the same stretch. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, three of the writers explained why they were drawn to well-known books and how they avoided simply repeating them.

Name recognition and a ready audience are part of the appeal. Sense and Sensibility screenwriter Diana Reid calls it "free IP." But she says the draw goes deeper, arguing that audiences want something substantial. In her view, there is deep satisfaction in meeting someone who seems very different, from another time with other customs, and then realizing that the person shares your emotional life. She also feels relief at joining a long line of Austen adaptations, since hers "doesn't need to be definitive."

Kazan first read John Steinbeck's novel at 15 and says she spent "a good 20 years" wanting to bring it to the screen. Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film, but she wanted to cover more of the book than that version did. She sees revisiting old novels as a form of connection across time, and describes it as "the opposite of AI" because it is not regurgitation. Daniel West, who wrote the four-part A Tale of Two Cities for MGM+, says Dickens' 1859 novel had gone without a major screen adaptation for nearly 40 years, making it a "unicorn."

None of the three moved their story into the present day. West and his producers considered a contemporary reimagining early on, then dropped it, because the injustice and cruelty in Dickens' story "already feel very 2026." "You don't need to spoon-feed the audience the modernity of it," he says. Instead, the writers concentrated on the characters.

West made Lucie Manette far more active than she is in the novel, where he says she is prone to weeping and fainting. In the series she drives the investigation in the early episodes. He replaced Jarvis Lorry and Miss Pross with a new character, Hester, played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster. He also shaped Thérèse Defarge into someone who is radicalized over the course of the story, and sharpened the central romance into a triangle among Sydney Carton, Lucie and Charles Darnay.

Kazan focused on Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh, and was surprised to find that Cathy "is almost always telling the truth." She also came to see the story as a love story between brothers Adam and Charles, which Cathy interrupts. Reid, meanwhile, lets Marianne and Elinor Dashwood each grow into a bit of the other. Her biggest liberty is staging a duel between Colonel Brandon and John Willoughby that Austen only mentions. She describes her approach as "respect rather than reverence," and she kept many of Austen's funniest lines word for word.

All three hope viewers will go on to read the books, and there are signs that is happening. Since the Oct. 1 debut of East of Eden, Penguin Classics says sales have risen nearly 200 percent across all formats, and the novel reached No. 1 on Amazon's bestsellers list 74 years after publication. The Economist reports that U.S. sales of The Odyssey have quadrupled this year, and Wuthering Heights topped Britain's bestseller list.

"Anything that can nudge people back toward bookshops and toward discovering those works again can only be a good thing," West says. Kazan adds that the key is helping young people feel they can find pleasure in reading. Reid hopes her film can make Austen feel "less intimidating" and help viewers find emotional truth in a story they thought was too remote.