# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-film-adaptation-of-a-book-once-considered-unfilmable*

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## Current results (5 votes)

1. **The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring** — 60% (3 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Peter Jackson's 2001 opening chapter of a trilogy studios had spent decades calling impossible to shoot.
2. **Perfume: The Story of a Murderer** — 20% (1 votes · score 615/1000)
   Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation of a novel built entirely on smell, a sense film cannot show.
3. **Dune (2021)** — 0% (0 votes · score 555/1000)
   Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of the novel that had defeated Jodorowsky and David Lynch, which went on to win six Academy Awards.
4. **Cloud Atlas** — 0% (0 votes · score 555/1000)
   The Wachowskis' and Tom Tykwer's 2012 attempt at David Mitchell's six nested stories across five centuries.
5. **2001: A Space Odyssey** — 20% (1 votes · score 515/1000)
   Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, written alongside Arthur C. Clarke's novel rather than from it.
6. **Life of Pi** — 0% (0 votes · score 508/1000)
   Ang Lee's 2012 film of a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger, a book long dismissed as unstageable.
7. **Adaptation.** — 0% (0 votes · score 394/1000)
   Spike Jonze's 2002 film about a screenwriter failing to adapt The Orchid Thief, which became the adaptation.
8. **Ulysses** — 0% (0 votes · score 394/1000)
   Joseph Strick's 1967 film of James Joyce's novel, the book most often named as impossible to adapt.
9. **Slaughterhouse-Five** — 0% (0 votes · score 324/1000)
   George Roy Hill's 1972 film of Kurt Vonnegut's time-scrambled novel, which Vonnegut himself praised.
10. **Watchmen** — 0% (0 votes · score 324/1000)
   Zack Snyder's 2009 adaptation of the graphic novel Alan Moore insisted could not exist as a film.
11. **Naked Lunch** — 0% (0 votes · score 245/1000)
   David Cronenberg's 1991 version of William S. Burroughs's cut-up novel, which he rebuilt as a story about writing it.
12. **Where the Wild Things Are** — 0% (0 votes · score 245/1000)
   Spike Jonze's 2009 feature grown from a picture book of ten sentences.
13. **The Road** — 0% (0 votes · score 245/1000)
   John Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's near-wordless post-apocalyptic novel.
14. **Blade Runner** — 0% (0 votes · score 151/1000)
   Ridley Scott's 1982 reworking of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into a noir.
15. **American Psycho** — 0% (0 votes · score 41/1000)
   Mary Harron's 2000 film of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, which turned unfilmable violence into satire.

Tags: movies, books, adaptations