15 Surprisingly Good Movie Adaptations About Public Domain Characters

There have been dozens of on-screen versions of Robin Hood dating back to the silent era, but none stand out from the crowd quite like the Mel Brooks spoof, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Part of its appeal can be attributed to the starring performance of Cary Elwes, whose role as the dashing pirate Westley in The Princess Bride had been sufficiently muddied by his transition to character acting to make him believable as a tongue-in-cheek, fourth-wall-breaking Robin Hood. As the titular leader of the Merry Men, Elwes is a smart aleck who spends more time trying to unlock Maid Marion’s chastity belt than giving to the poor. It also benefited from timing. Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was released two years before, and although it had done well at the box office, its humorlessness and wooden performances were perfect fodder for parody. Men in Tights succeeds by skewering the saintly version of Robin Hood found in most adaptations and filling the script with anachronisms and sight gags. In one scene, Robin’s blind family servant, Blinkin, sits on a latrine reading a vision-impaired version of Playboy in which the photos can be read by touch, like braille. Another scene parodies The Godfather with a character who mumbles and wheezes through a monologue, only to remove cotton balls from his cheeks - which Marlon Brando famously employed in his role of Vito Corleone - and explain that he’s just been to the dentist. Dave Chappelle plays one of Robin’s associates and sports Nike-like sneakers, while Brooks himself plays a Jewish version of Friar Tuck named Rabbi Tuckman. Men in Tights plays fast and loose with its source material, allowing the comedy to be front and center. This shamelessness makes it one of the more memorable and satisfying on-screen representations of Robin Hood.

Charles Dickens is one of the most highly-regarded authors in the English language whose stories are full of dense writing and memorable characters. There is plenty of humor throughout his novels, but not the kind that you might expect to perfectly dovetail with the 20th century’s most beloved puppet ensemble. And yet, The Muppet Christmas Carol was a success both by box office standards (despite formidable competition from Home Alone 2 and Aladdin) and by the test of longevity. In a genre packed with favorites, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a mainstay on family holiday watchlists. Michael Caine’s curmudgeonly Scrooge is a pitch-perfect foil for the puppets to work against, and the screenwriters took great pains to stick to Dickens’s story despite the trademark Muppet humor. Gonzo and Rizzo are on top form as Dickens and his sidekick, while Kermit’s mini-me Robin is adorable as a pint-sized Tiny Tim. The songs are catchy, the humor undermines the solemnity, and the ghosts are genuinely scary. They’re so scary, in fact, that Rizzo asks Gonzo if they should be worried about the kids in the audience. “Nah, it’s alright. This is culture,” he responds. The Muppet Christmas Carol manages to deliver both an excellent Muppet movie and an excellent Dickens adaptation all in one, making it the perfect option for holiday viewing that the whole family will love.

The 1922 silent classic Nosferatu is one of the greatest horror movies ever made and set the bar high for future adaptations of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula. Over the following decades, multiple on-screen adaptations of the story were released, but even Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of the mythical vampire failed to be as unsettling or cinematically innovative as F. W. Murnau’s work. In 1992, however, Francis Ford Coppola brought his signature style of exhaustive filmmaking to the table and proved that there was more life (and blood) in the story than had yet made it to the screen. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is in a league of its own. From Gary Oldman’s over-the-top performance as Count Dracula to the costumes and the wild in-camera special effects, it oozes with excess that at times spills over into camp. Coppola created a version of the story that capitalizes on every facet of the cinematic medium. The soundscape creaks, whooshes, and shudders, the costumes are made of twice as much fabric as necessary, and the performances (aside from a miscast Keanu Reeves) operate at a fever pitch. The director opted to use only in-camera special effects, using makeup and time-honored tricks to create a horrifying and timeless spectacle. He also chose to set the film at the turn-of-the 20th-century, with Dracula posing as a devilishly handsome foreigner whose luscious locks and blue-tinted sunglasses wouldn’t be out of place at the Grammys circa 2018. The sexual undertones of Stoker’s novel are also dialed up to the maximum setting, and the various combinations of seduction, demise, and rivers of blood are almost certainly more grotesque than anything that could have appeared in the author's nightmares. Throwing everything at the wall doesn’t always work in movies, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves that when it does, the results can be overwhelming in the best ways.

Disney is best known as a total hit-making factory, but it occasionally misses the mark. Such was the surprising case for the 2002 animated movie Treasure Planet, which bombed at the box office despite its star-studded cast and has only recently enjoyed the credit it deserves. Based loosely on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island, it follows Jim Hawkins (voiced by Joseph-Gordon Levitt), an unruly teen who is whisked off on an intergalactic adventure when he finds a map that leads to the titular Treasure Planet. Unlike Stevenson’s novel, which is set on the high seas, Treasure Planet is a retro-futuristic sci-fi fantasy that combines 2D and 3D animation to create a unique visual style inspired both by the 1800s and a space-travel version of the future. It also puts a spin on Disney’s love of talking animals, featuring a feline ship captain (Emma Thompson) and a dog astronomer (David Hyde Pierce) alongside a pirate cyborg and a few aliens. Directed by Disney stalwarts Ron Clements and John Musker, who had previously made The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, Treasure Planet is a surprisingly inventive retelling of Stevenson’s classic novel, with visually-arresting animation and colorful characters. It may not be the most faithful retelling of the book, but it justifies its liberties with pure spectacle.

Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers in 1844, long before movies were a part of everyday life, but he may as well have written it directly for the screen. Set in the 1600s, the swashbuckling story of three swordsmen (and one wannabe) is full of adventure, gallantry, and humor and has proven to be endlessly inspiring to filmmakers. In fact, movies about the Three Musketeers encompass the history of cinema itself, from the 1911 production made by Thomas Edison’s studio to versions starring everyone from John Wayne and Christopher Walken to Charlie Sheen and Orlando Bloom. There have been so many adaptations that it’s hard not to roll your eyes when another one gallops into theaters. Of all of these movies, however, the 1973 version has stood the test of time, not only because of its stellar cast but because it revels in its source material. Starring Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay as the Three Musketeers alongside Michael York, Raquel Welch, Charlton Heston, and Faye Dunaway, the movie bursts with energy, humor, and romance. While the plot resides firmly in the 17th century, the presence of '70s movie stars like Welch and Dunaway, as well as an appearance from comedian Spike Milligan, make the film feel fresh and a little brazen, even as it reverently follows Dumas’s story. There have been many more productions of the classic tale before and since, but the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers still holds up as a classic.

Over the years, more than a dozen movies about King Arthur have been given mainstream releases. Some have tried to tell the legend as faithfully as possible, while others (Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes to mind) have taken a more loose approach. Out of all of these efforts, John Boorman’s 1981 epic Excalibur has stood the test of time. Based on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, it stars Nigel Terry as King Arthur and a host of British actors in supporting roles, including Helen Mirren as the evil sorceress Morgana and a young Liam Neeson as Gawain. It takes a sweeping approach to the tale, starting with Arthur’s origin story and following through to the bitter end. It’s an operatic family drama as much as a tale about knights in shining armor. Full of deception, and unfaithfulness, it doesn’t pull its punches. It also features some of the most visually stunning imagery of any Arthur film despite the rudimentary special effects. Boorman never shied away from discomfort, and Excalibur is just as harsh and unsentimental a movie as you’d expect from the man who brought Deliverance into your nightmares. There’s gore, impalement, eyes getting plucked out of cadavers, and a lot of mud. But the darkness is tempered by some first-class scenery chewing, particularly from Nicol Williamson as Merlin, who takes hold of every scene with a vice-like grip and wrings out every last syllable. Add to this a unique visual style in which everything is shrouded in a dreamlike haze punctuated by gleaming metal, and it’s hard not to appreciate Excalibur for its relentless intensity. Where other retellings of the legend struggle to be more than formulaic costume dramas or choose to change the tone of the familiar story entirely to appeal to contemporary audiences, Boorman’s Excalibur has all the grime and bone-crunching of the Middle Ages, and none of the Hollywood glossiness that undermines so many other cinematic portrayals of Camelot.

J. M. Barrie’s story of a flying boy who never has to grow up has delighted children since it premiered as a play in 1904. While the 1953 animated Disney movie is the definitive on-screen adaptation for generations of viewers, it is arguably bested by the criminally underappreciated live-action adaptation from 2003. P. J. Hogan’s Peter Pan features a level of emotional nuance and generosity toward its characters that no other version has captured before or since. Starring Jeremy Sumpter as Peter, Rachel Hurd-Wood as Wendy Darling, and Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, it adheres to Barrie’s play and the Disney movie while acknowledging the peril in the story and the consequences of Peter’s refusal to age. In most adaptations, Peter is portrayed as the ultimate adventure facilitator. He’s a child, but he knows his way around danger and loves taunting his enemies. He delights in the friendship he develops with the Darlings, but he’s also content to stay in Neverland when all is said and done. In short, he’s happy with being a fun-seeking loner who never grows up. In the 2003 movie, however, Peter undergoes an internal struggle when he falls in love with Wendy, and his decision to stay in Neverland while the Darlings and the Lost Boys return to the real world is more tragic than triumphant. Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are also portrayed as more wistful than evil. Somewhere along the line, life got away from them, and they found themselves stuck with their regrets. Though this version of Peter Pan is just as full of adventure, danger, and friendship as the animated movie, it has more heart and sadness than any of the other adaptations, even ones like Hook and Pan that take more liberties with the source material.

Revisiting childhood classics often backfires, but Disney has repeatedly proven that there is more to be drawn from their beloved back catalog. Most of the studio’s remakes focus on increasingly sophisticated technology to turn animated classics into hit live-action spectacles. For example, the 2016 update of The Jungle Book used cutting-edge CGI to make talking animals look uncannily life-like. But the 1994 remake of Disney’s 1967 animated movie deserves even more credit despite being largely overshadowed by flashier entries on Disney’s remake roster. Inspired by the 1967 classic and Rudyard Kipling’s novel, The Jungle Book was the studio’s first live-action remake of one of its own properties and helped pave the way for a tidal wave of others. It stars 28-year-old Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli, and, as you might guess from the actor’s age, is more grown-up and full of peril than the original. In this version, Mowgli is a teenager who reunites with his childhood sweetheart, Kitty (Lena Headey), when he is forced back into the real world. One of the strengths of this adaptation is that director Stephen Sommers undertook the gargantuan task of filming with real animals. In total, there were 52, including tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, elephants, bulls, monkeys, and horses. This gives the movie a feeling of reality that the 2016 version never manages to accomplish because it’s impossible not to gape at the technology. The 1994 movie is similar to Indiana Jones with its heart-pounding adventure, wild locations, and romantic leading man. For these reasons, it’s a welcome outlier in the Jungle Book canon that neither competes with its predecessors nor strays too far from the familiar story.

Mark Twain’s favorite adolescent ne’er-do-well, Huckleberry Finn, has appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows. Left to his own devices by an alcoholic father, he knocks around the fictional Missouri town of St. Petersburg, petrifying parents and delighting children with his lawless antics. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is also a deeply fraught novel that was banned in the 1880s for its alleged crassness and heavily criticized in later years for its stereotyping of a runaway enslaved man named Jim who befriends Huck. Disney has a checkered history with race in its movies, making a Huckleberry Finn adaptation all the more risky for the studio to undertake. Still, against the odds, the 1993 film starring Elijah Wood as the titular troublemaker turned out pretty well. Written and directed by Stephen Sommers, The Adventures of Huck Finn focuses more on the growing friendship between the protagonist and Jim (Courtney B. Vance) rather than on the moral reckoning with slavery that Huck has in the book. Elijah Wood was 11 when the movie came out, making him a few years younger than Twain’s character. With the mischievous twinkle in his eye and infectious smirk, he’s an endearing, childlike Huck who has little of the book’s world-weary coarseness. These factors smooth the edges of Twain’s novel, rendering it an ideal adaptation for kids. It’s one of those Disney movies that is so full of heart and adventure that you can’t help but get swept along.

Playing Hamlet is a rite of passage for many actors. Throughout the years, Shakespeare’s most tormented Dane has been portrayed on-screen by everyone from Sir Laurence Olivier to Mel Gibson, but few adaptations have captured the depth, cinematic flair, and faithfulness to the source material as Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 version. Directed by and starring Branagh, the movie boasts a four-hour runtime that dwarfs previous versions and allows Shakespeare’s language and cadence to shine through. Branagh is a classically trained Shakespearian actor who portrayed Hamlet on the London stage, but he brought a distinctly cinematic style to the movie, ensuring that the story, which features the entirety of Shakespeare’s text, never feels like a filmed stage production. The result is a surprisingly riveting four-hour drama that even Shakespeare novices will be won over by. The movie updates the play by setting it in the 1800s rather than the 1400s. This makes the fashion and surroundings more familiar and offers plenty of opportunities for splashes of color and excess despite the tragedy of the plot. The characters are more vibrant than morose. Even Hamlet’s mother, the supposedly icy Queen Gertrude (Julie Christie), and his uncle-turned-stepfather King Claudius (Derek Jacobi), are shown carousing in one scene, while Kate Winslet’s portrayal of Ophelia is more lively and layered than the character is often portrayed. Branagh also used flashbacks to illustrate some of the monologues, including one that takes place in Hamlet’s childhood and one that shows the sexual relationship between the prince and Ophelia, which is only hinted at in a letter in the play. All of these choices make the 1996 Hamlet less austere and more cinematic than other on-screen attempts and constitute one of the best film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work.

Sherlock Holmes without Baker Street, Watson, or much of a memory is hardly a promising recipe for a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective. Alas, when you add Ian McKellan, beekeeping, and a child sidekick to the proceedings, everything turns out surprisingly well. Mr. Holmes takes a radically different view of the sleuth in the deerstalker hat, imagining him as a 93-year-old living on the English coast after WWII. This Holmes tries everything to fend off age-related memory loss. He keeps bees to harvest royal jelly that supposedly helps with his condition, and he’s just returned from a trip to Japan to procure prickly ash, which is believed to have similar properties. While mulling over the tragedy that ended his career and debunking myths about his past to the occasional fan - he did not, he insists, wear a deerstalker or smoke a pipe - he befriends his housekeeper’s young son Roger (Milo Parker) and teaches him the art of beekeeping. There is no mystery in Mr. Holmes to grip the famous detective other than the puzzles of his past. It’s a slow-moving character study, and McKellan excels in it, bringing the element of humanity to the character that so many other portrayals lack. Focusing on the regrets of an older man who can’t let go of the past even as his memories are slipping from his grasp is a surprising angle on the Sherlock Holmes mythology. It may not have the intrigue of the BBC’s Sherlock or the panache of Basil Rathbone, but it’s earned a place on the list of essential Holmes adaptations.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio was released only a few months after Disney’s live-action remake of its 1940 animated movie hit theaters. But while the Disney remake was savagely panned, del Toro’s stop-motion version won an Oscar. The director focused on Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 novel rather than the Disney movie, but chose to set it in Fascist Italy, a strange decision at first glance that ultimately pays off. The story of a wooden puppet who is forced to conform to the restrictive society around him to become a “real boy” has hints of authoritarianism, but del Toro wanted to heighten this aspect of the story. It may be a children’s movie, but in its portrayal of a sympathetic outcast imperiled by harsh authorities, del Toro’s Pinocchio is more aligned with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water than the Disney classic. The movie doesn’t shy away from tragedy, either, showing how the woodcarver Geppetto loses his son during WWI and the anguish that drives him to create a wooden boy who he does not at first want anything to do with. Then there’s the visual element. Pinocchio took two years and 60 sets to create, and the result is so fluid and intricate that it looks like groundbreaking CGI. Del Toro is known for visually-striking horror movies in which the monsters are the victims and the humans are the villains. Pinocchio thrives by riffing on these themes without making them scarier than kids can handle. The result is a heartfelt, immersive, and fiercely original take on the classic story.

Beauty and the Beast combined with an episode of Black Mirror may not sound like an obvious match, but the 2021 anime movie Belle proves that taking a risky approach to a well-known property can pay off. The story centers on Suzu, a withdrawn teenage outcast with a tragic past who finds refuge in a virtual reality platform called “U.” Within U, Suzu transforms into a luminous apparition with flowing hair, dewy skin, and the voice of an angel. She rockets to fame as a pop star but is distracted by a monstrous creature known only as “the Dragon.” Despite his infamy as one of the most powerful and controversial figures in U, Suzu - whose avatar is called “Belle” - senses pain beneath the surface that she recognizes all too well. Her quest to find the Dragon and uncover his real-world identity threatens her place within U and shakes up her life on the outside. Belle is only loosely based on Beauty and the Beast, but it pulls out the most poignant threads of the story, focusing on the unreliability of appearances and the value of real-world connection. Suzu and the Dragon live in different parts of the country and are undergoing different forms of pain, but together, they move past their struggles and reclaim their identities outside of U. Though far from a beat-for-beat retelling of the fairytale, Belle puts a modern spin on the familiar story and brings it to life in a surprisingly moving way.

Dreamchild is a particularly surprising and creative adaptation of a beloved story. Drawing on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it tells of the real-life woman who inspired the author’s main character and how the book altered the course of her life, for better or worse. Alice Hargreaves (Coral Browne) is an older woman at the start of the movie. She’s frail and forgetful and is surprised by how much attention she receives while on a trip to New York for a centenary celebration of Carroll’s birth. The experience fuels long-forgotten memories as she slips into reveries about the strange, often frightening characters in Carroll’s novel and the unusual, sometimes warped, and quasi-romantic relationship she had with the author. It’s a surreal movie that hints at something dark beneath the surface of Carroll’s interest in Alice as a young girl but never strays into inappropriate or coercive territory. It’s difficult to imagine a retelling of the author’s absurdist novel that is as emotionally layered and enigmatic as Dreamchild. Most adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland spill out of the screen in a riot of colors and eccentricities, and Dreamchild can’t help but stand out from the pack with its restraint. Alice’s hallucinations are more nightmarish than dreamlike, and the movie doesn’t pile on the whimsy the way most stories about Carroll’s character do. Instead, Dreamchild leaves viewers with lingering questions that stretch beyond the confines of Wonderland.

Frankenstein often conjures frightening images of a lumbering figure covered in bandages and stitches, but Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel has always been about unintended consequences rather than monsters. Larry Fessenden’s 2019 horror movie Depraved latches onto this premise with chilling and often moving results. David Call plays Henry, a present-day army medic with PTSD who cobbles together a living creature (Alex Breaux) from scavenged body parts, including the brain of a slain college student. He calls the monster Adam and marvels at his accomplishment while his friend, Polidari, immediately starts calculating how much money can be made from the scientific breakthrough. Unlike in many adaptations of Shelley’s novel, the doctor’s motives are not fueled by delusions of grandeur but by guilt and emotional challenges. He’s suffering from the horrors he's witnessed and thinks creating life will help him heal. Like the creature in the novel and many of its film adaptations, Adam is unprepared for the unabashed harshness of our world. Adam simply doesn’t have the tools to master it, no matter how many puzzles and aptitude tests he passes. He, too, is plagued by memories, but they belong to the slain man whose brain he now possesses. Both Henry and Adam commit irreparable acts of cruelty, but neither does so with malevolent intentions. Depraved puts a new spin on Shelley’s tale, and though it lacks the drama of earlier adaptations, it is just as tragic and grisly.