What is the best film adaptation of a book once considered unfilmable?

Studios called each of these books impossible to shoot. Someone shot it anyway, and the results range from career-defining to career-ending.

1

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Peter Jackson's 2001 opening chapter of a trilogy studios had spent decades calling impossible to shoot.

1000pts

2

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation of a novel built entirely on smell, a sense film cannot show.

615pts

3

Dune (2021)

Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of the novel that had defeated Jodorowsky and David Lynch, which went on to win six Academy Awards.

555pts

4

Cloud Atlas

The Wachowskis' and Tom Tykwer's 2012 attempt at David Mitchell's six nested stories across five centuries.

555pts

5

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, written alongside Arthur C. Clarke's novel rather than from it.

515pts

6

Life of Pi

Ang Lee's 2012 film of a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger, a book long dismissed as unstageable.

508pts

7

Adaptation.

Spike Jonze's 2002 film about a screenwriter failing to adapt The Orchid Thief, which became the adaptation.

394pts

8

Ulysses

Joseph Strick's 1967 film of James Joyce's novel, the book most often named as impossible to adapt.

394pts

9

Slaughterhouse-Five

George Roy Hill's 1972 film of Kurt Vonnegut's time-scrambled novel, which Vonnegut himself praised.

324pts

10

Watchmen

Zack Snyder's 2009 adaptation of the graphic novel Alan Moore insisted could not exist as a film.

324pts

11

Naked Lunch

David Cronenberg's 1991 version of William S. Burroughs's cut-up novel, which he rebuilt as a story about writing it.

245pts

12

Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze's 2009 feature grown from a picture book of ten sentences.

245pts

13

The Road

John Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's near-wordless post-apocalyptic novel.

245pts

14

Blade Runner

Ridley Scott's 1982 reworking of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into a noir.

151pts

15

American Psycho

Mary Harron's 2000 film of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, which turned unfilmable violence into satire.

41pts