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. 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. 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. 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. 4
   Cloud Atlas

   The Wachowskis' and Tom Tykwer's 2012 attempt at David Mitchell's six nested stories across five centuries.
   555pts
5. 5
   2001: A Space Odyssey

   Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, written alongside Arthur C. Clarke's novel rather than from it.
   515pts
6. 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. 7
   Adaptation.

   Spike Jonze's 2002 film about a screenwriter failing to adapt The Orchid Thief, which became the adaptation.
   394pts
8. 8
   Ulysses

   Joseph Strick's 1967 film of James Joyce's novel, the book most often named as impossible to adapt.
   394pts
9. 9
   Slaughterhouse-Five

   George Roy Hill's 1972 film of Kurt Vonnegut's time-scrambled novel, which Vonnegut himself praised.
   324pts
10. 10
    Watchmen

    Zack Snyder's 2009 adaptation of the graphic novel Alan Moore insisted could not exist as a film.
    324pts
11. 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. 12
    Where the Wild Things Are

    Spike Jonze's 2009 feature grown from a picture book of ten sentences.
    245pts
13. 13
    The Road

    John Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's near-wordless post-apocalyptic novel.
    245pts
14. 14
    Blade Runner

    Ridley Scott's 1982 reworking of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into a noir.
    151pts
15. 15
    American Psycho

    Mary Harron's 2000 film of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, which turned unfilmable violence into satire.
    0pts

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