Free IP and Fresh Eyes: How Hollywood Is Reinventing the Classics

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

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East of Eden showrunner Zoe Kazan has had her eye on adapting John Steinbeck’s family saga since she first read it at 15. “Somebody has to put the thing on screen that I see in my head,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. And after “a good 20 years” of carrying that feeling, the opportunity to translate the story to screen finally came to fruition, with Kazan’s vision unfurling as an eight-episode Netflix limited series.

Hollywood has never been shy about mining the classics, with Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird and Little Women among the staples of film and TV’s page-to-screen catalog.

This year, Kazan’s dip into the classic canon is joined by the likes of Christopher Nolan, who has taken on Homer’s The Odyssey, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and new versions of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Steinbeck, Austen and Dickens come with name recognition, a built-in audience and, as Sense and Sensibility screenwriter Diana Reid puts it, “free IP.” But the prestige and name recognition only get a project so far with audiences desperate for something fresh.

This year, the writers behind Netflix’s East of Eden, Focus Features’ Sense and Sensibility and MGM+’s A Tale of Two Cities used that audience demand to do something different: leave the novels’ worlds intact and rebuild the people inside them.

For Kazan, that meant re-reading Steinbeck’s Cathy. For Daniel West, it was giving Dickens’ Lucie a pulse. Reid let the Dashwood sisters Marianne and Elinor each grow into a bit of the other.

And while a famous novel might spark initial curiosity, it offers no inherent road map once development begins. So rather than reimagining these books through a modern lens, each writer chose to lean into the ways the stories already transcend time.

“You don’t need to spoon-feed the audience the modernity of it,” West says.

Why a Classic Novel Already Has Appeal

Reid is the first to admit the commercial logic of adapting a classic. “I think they are classic for a reason,” she says. But the appeal runs deeper. In an era of surface-level connection, she argues, audiences crave something that feels substantial.

“There’s nothing more satisfying as an audience than encountering someone who’s superficially very different from you — they live in another time, they have different values and customs, they dress in a bizarre way — and then realizing that emotionally you have the same inner life.”

She also knows she won’t be the last to take on Austen. “It’s nice to be part of such a big catalog. On one hand it’s an honor, and on the other it takes pressure off, because it’ll be one of many. It doesn’t need to be definitive.”

West’s pitch for A Tale of Two Cities, a four-part series that premiered on MGM+ last month, started with what he calls a “unicorn”: a book with a huge cultural footprint that, by his account, hadn’t had a major screen adaptation in nearly 40 years. He and star and executive producer Kit Harington had been talking about adapting Dickens’ 1859 novel for roughly a decade, noting that there “hasn’t really been a seminal TV or film adaptation” of the story.

“It was done quite a lot in the first half of the 20th century, but then it petered out. So a large part of the draw was the opportunity: There was this huge built-in audience that already knew the book, or at least knew of it,” he says.

“The story itself is incredibly timely,” he adds. “It’s about a disenfranchised, broken society that is pushing back and reaching a crisis point. Within that, there’s a very personal, intimate love story.”

Kazan has a personal tie to East of Eden — her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film — but part of her motivation for making a series was to tell more of the novel than that film did. Though Steinbeck’s book was published in 1952, she says, “there’s this beautiful continuum between us and the past,” which is part of what makes revisiting a classic so appealing.

Looking backward and forward at the same time, she adds, “is a profound part of what makes us human.”

“It’s the opposite of AI. It’s not regurgitation, not spitting back up what we’ve already digested,” she says. “It’s why we should read these books. They’re like a bow shot across time from one human to another.”

Rethinking the Novels’ Protagonists

Still, none of the three writers treated an established title as a safety net. Instead, their adaptations declined to modernize the novel’s setting and embraced finding new ways into the protagonists.

While developing A Tale of Two Cities, West and his producers considered a contemporary reimagining early on before dropping it. “The issues these characters are dealing with, the injustice and the way it bleeds into vengeance and cruelty, already feel very 2026,” he says.

What he changed instead was characterization. In Dickens’ novel, heroine Lucie Manette is “prone to a lot of weeping” and “quite a lot of fainting,” West says. “She’s not the most compelling heroine in large passages of it. So we made some fundamental changes. We made her much more intentional.”

He wanted Lucie to be “the central pivot of the entire story” and “the investigative force” of the opening episodes, pushing against the walls of “buttoned-up Georgian London.”

“That was a fairly big modernization from the book,” he says. Of Mirren Mack, who plays Lucie in the series, he adds: “Lucie is the central component of the whole thing, the sun at the center of the solar system, and then an actor arrives who delivers all of that and more and elevates it through her own interpretation.”

He also replaced Jarvis Lorry and Miss Pross — who he felt were “serving a similar purpose” and were too “big and colorful” for the series’ taut, volatile tone — with a new character, Hester (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). “She isn’t a proxy father figure to Lucie. She’s an inherited family member, almost an inherited stepmother. … As the story goes on, they discover that they mean a lot to each other and are more than just inherited relations. They really are family, but they come to that on their own terms. That gives them a larger emotional distance to travel.”

Thérèse Defarge (Roxane Duran) marks another departure. “We wanted to see somebody become, for want of a less anachronistic word, radicalized,” West says. “She starts as part of her community. She has a warmth and generosity. Because of what happens to her within the story, we see that crack begin to metastasize into something really sinister and ugly, and by the end, murderous. When we meet her in episode one, she’s a completely different person from what we see at the very end of the show.”

Dickens’ book centers on a couple, but West wanted to “intensify that” and “twist it slightly into much more of a triangle and make it more live and more complex” between Sydney Carton (Harington), Lucie (Mack) and Charles Darnay (François Civil). “That way we don’t really know which way Lucie is going to go until she does, toward the back end of the story. I also wanted both men to be equally attractive, equally intriguing and volatile, each speaking to a different side of her, so we really feel the pull, the tension and the dilemma she’s wrestling with.”

Kazan’s re-reading centered on Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), the character who first hooked her in Steinbeck’s story. Writing the series, which released on Netflix on Oct. 1, she realized something she hadn’t anticipated: Cathy “is almost always telling the truth.”

A fresh perspective also helped Kazan see the story as a love story between brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist), one that Cathy interrupts. “By watching Chris and Mike interact, I understood how much these characters loved each other,” she says.

Respecting the Literary Blueprint — and Knowing When to Change It

Creative liberties, the writers insist, aren’t changes for the sake of it. Reid describes her approach as “respect rather than reverence.” Her biggest liberty is a duel between Herbert Nordrum’s Colonel Brandon and Frank Dillane’s John Willoughby, which Austen mentions but keeps offstage. “Hearing about things secondhand in a novel is not so confusing, but on screen, hearing a character describe it isn’t very interesting,” she says. “You need to see it to reveal the drama.”

Austen’s voice also served as a guide for balancing drama with wit. “When I read the book, I made a note of the lines that made me laugh, and a lot of those ended up verbatim in the film. Jane Austen’s just really funny,” Reid says.

Kazan’s challenge was the opposite: too much book. She was only interested in adapting it as a series because “the book is simply too big,” and even with seven episodes, “half is not in our series.”

For A Tale of Two Cities, West’s key structural decision was genre. “I always wanted it to be a thriller: a very taut, limited story,” he explains. “Four episodes felt like the perfect length to keep the pace and stakes up, and to never let any of the characters settle. I really wanted to make sure that all the characters, whether they’re in London or Paris or moving between the two, are always in a state of agitation. Their feet are never quite on solid ground, so we feel the jeopardy and the volatility of their world.”

Why We Keep Going Back

Asked why classics keep returning, each offers their own perspective. West points to archetypes and longevity. A Tale of Two Cities, he says, “is the archetypal sacrificial story,” with “strong parallels in that act of sacrifice to the Bible and all the stories that form the basis of our narratives and our emotional map of the world.”

Classics “still feel timeless, and they still feel as resonant today,” West adds. “The key thing for us as creatives is to find a new way of telling those classic stories, an angle and something new to say about them. That doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. It just means giving yourself the license to look at them with fresh eyes.”

Reid returns to the idea that classics are “classics for a reason.” She explains that “when an audience doesn’t feel patronized” and an adaptation allows “the classic to exist in its own time, that makes for incredibly powerful viewing.”

Kazan sees adaptations as a way to lower the barrier for new readers. “One thing these adaptations can do is make a general audience feel they have access to East of Eden, The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights.”

While they have differing ideas about what keeps the classics coming back, all three writers share the same hope: that viewers will pick up the book. Classics haven’t disappeared from school reading lists, but students are reportedly reading significantly fewer full-length books than in past decades.

“As long as we don’t ban and burn these books, everybody will continue to have access to them,” Kazan says. “There are so many books I came to as an adult that changed my life, and if I’d read them in high school, I wouldn’t have cared or understood. The most important thing is to let kids feel they can have pleasure in reading.”

There’s already evidence that these adaptations are sending people back to the page. Since the series’ Oct. 1 debut, sales of East of Eden have risen nearly 200 percent across all formats, according to publisher Penguin Classics. The novel also hit No. 1 on Amazon’s bestsellers list — 74 years after it was published. The Economist reports that U.S. sales of The Odyssey have quadrupled this year, while 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. “The reason the work of classic storytellers like Dickens, Shakespeare and Austen still resonates is that they’re saying something about the human condition, about what we’re all struggling with, yearning for and reaching for.”

“It would be amazing if people went back to the book,” Reid says. If Sense and Sensibility “could make Austen and the classics feel less intimidating, and encourage people to see themselves in it and find emotional truth in a story they thought was too remote, that would be amazing!”