25 Novels That Should Have Movie Adaptations

It’s no secret that Hollywood is out of ideas. Instead of coming up with original scripts and plots, the movie industry depends heavily on comics, older films, and video games for its next big hit. But no form of entertainment has been as ravaged by Hollywood as literature.

Every year, countless movies are released that are based off of the hard work of authors from around the globe. In fact, out of the nine movies up for Best Picture this year at the failure-prone Academy Awards, five of them were adapted from novels.

This Friday marks the release of the latest novel-to-film adaptation, The Hunger Games, which was originally written as a young adult book by Suzanne Collins. In the same vein as Twilight and Harry Potter, The Hunger Games is set to be the first of three movies based on the trilogy of books. And with Hollywood eyeing every book as a potential million-dollar movie franchise, we have a few suggestions: 25 Novels That Should Have Movie Adaptations.

Written by Jason Serafino (@serafinoj1)

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Status: Not in development

Christopher Moore is one of the best absurdist authors currently stringing words together, so it should come as no surprise that his novel, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, makes the list. The title alone should have any self-respecting agnostic out there grinning from ear-to-ear.

After Jesus’ childhood friend, Biff, is resurrected in the present day, he is tasked with filling in the missing pages in the Bible by the archangel Raziel. What follows is a sharp bit of humor that recounts the adventures of Biff and Christ (who is actually named Joshua, according to Biff) as they travel to find the Three Wise Men and discover the true purpose of Joshua’s life. It’s not a nasty slam on religion, but more of a light-hearted satire that never takes itself too seriously.

Status: Not in development

Although it seems like almost every Chuck Palahniuk novel is in development at various studios around Hollywood, Damned appears to have been forgotten. It’s his latest novel, and it's one of his better ones in recent memory. After a 13-year-old girl named Madison is sent to Hell after dying of an apparent marijuana overdose, she is forced to spend eternity with a group of diverse Hell-mates that are inspired by the characters from The Breakfast Club.

There is plenty of insensitivity and mean-spiritedness here, and, to be honest, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Hollywood would have to leave its morals at the door when adapting this novel, but if a studio does decide to dive in, it would have a surprisingly fresh idea on its hands. With most movies nowadays designed to sell toys and Slurpee cups, an adaptation of Damned could be the kick to the crotch that the film industry so desperately needs.

Status: Not in development

No, this isn’t a book about Star Wars fans finding love at Comic-Con. Geek Love is about a couple running a traveling carnival when the business begins to fail. In order to make their show more attractive, they try to breed their own human oddities by using experimental drugs and dangerous radiation to alter their children. The result is five children: Arturo, the Aquaboy; Iphy, and Elly, the Siamese twins; Oly, the albino hunchback dwarf; and Fortunado, the normal looking one with secret powers.

It’s dark and twisted, but that’s what would make this such a great adaptation. It also proves that there is something to love about even the most repulsive people, and shows us a level of humanity that isn’t often found in a book about freaks.

Status: Not in development

The man behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox is back with…an erotic novel? That’s right. My Uncle Oswald is smuttiness in print form, courtesy of the master of children’s literature, Roald Dahl.

In the book, Oswald discovers a rare African beetle that can boost any man’s sexual potency when consumed. This leads the entrepreneurial man to collect these beetles and sell them to men around the globe. It’s filthy and hilarious, but it never becomes too obscene. There is a great movie to be made here, and we can’t help but see a reinvigorated Johnny Depp or Ewan McGregor in the role of young Uncle Oswald.

Status: Not in development

It was listed on The New York Times Children's Bestseller List for over 200 weeks, but for some reason no one has any intention on adapting Markus Zusak's brilliant novel, The Book Thief, for the screen. Narrated by Death, the book follows the life of a young girl named Liesel Meminger during WWII as she deals with her foster parents and a young Jewish boy who hides in their home as the war escalates.

Her habit of stealing books and sharing them with the neighborhood is the driving force of the story as Zusak expounds upon the power of reading throughout the novel. It might be a quaint little message, but in an increasingly digital world where great novels are being ignored in favor of tweets and Facebook statuses, it's a theme that needs to be explored. Even if it is explored on the screen.

Status: Not in development

2011’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy reminded us just how great the spy genre can be on film when done right. It also made us realize that the world is in dire need of an adaptation of Charles McCarry’s The Miernik Dossier. Like any spy book worth its salt, the story puts its focus on a group of international agents who are attempting to prove that there is a traitor in their midst. The book itself is set up in the form of fictionalized communications and dossiers that all come together to paint a clear picture of espionage and betrayal.

If the movie version could change a few details here and there, and implement narration and flashbacks to its advantage, then it should be able to capture the unique style of the book. It is also important to point out that McCarry used to work for the CIA before writing this book, so there would be a level of authenticity here that isn’t present in most spy movies.

Status: Not in development

Niven and Pournelle’s lost classic Inferno revolves around a disgruntled author named Allen Carpentier who dies and finds himself upon the shores of Hell. Once there, he is approached by a mysterious man named Benito who shows him around the molten kingdom of the dammed. This is the same Hell that Dante Alighieri once roamed through in The Divine Comedy, and Niven and Pournelle fill it with the same twisted terror and fear of the original poem. But because Carpentier is disconnected from religion, he tries in vain to rationalize everything that he sees with science.

The visuals in this novel alone would be enough to make an interesting movie. Flowing rivers of lava, twisted creatures fluttering around, and the sight of Satan himself would be the perfect canvas for a director like Guillermo Del Toro to perform his special effects magic.

Status: Not in development

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the somewhat fictionalized story of Dave Eggers, who had to raise his youngest brother by himself after both of their parents died unexpectedly at a young age. It’s an emotional portrayal of strength and resolve in a world that has seemingly turned its back on this splintered family.

The rights have been purchased by studios in the past, but nothing has ever come of it. This would make for a beautiful movie, especially if it’s written by Eggers himself, who is currently a screenwriter in Hollywood with scripts like Away We Go and Where the Wild Things Are under his belt. This could be so much more than emotional Oscar bait; it is a memoir about a family that had to overcome the type of adversity that sometimes gets overlooked in our world.

Status: Not in development

If you think Game of Thrones is tough-as-nails, then you should check out Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories series, starting with The Last Kingdom. Here, the world of the Vikings is detailed in bloody fashion with large-scale battles and authentic historical information backing everything up. The main narrative is about Uhtred, the orphaned son of an Earl, who becomes adopted by Ragnar the Dane, a Viking warrior, after his homeworld is wiped out.

The Last Kingdom details the battles between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, and this first installment of the series is the perfect place for any movie series to begin. Being steeped in historical fact would make The Last Kingdom stand out from the more fantasy-driven sword-and-shield fare of recent years, but there is more than enough bloodshed and family drama to keep most any viewer glued to the screen.

Status: Not in development

Paul Auster is one of literature’s best kept secrets. His novels are always gripping and enigmatic, yet you really have to be in-the-know to even be aware of him. And his most impressive achievement is the mind-bending detective tale, City of Glass.

The novel revolves around a writer named Daniel Quinn who masquerades as a private investigator after being mistaken for one on the phone. The detective that he is mistaken for is named Paul Auster. Curiously enough, Quinn bumps into another Paul Auster later on, who is the actual author of the novel put in the novel itself.

Confusing, right? This leads to a reality-bending, post-modern dilemma that explores the very nature of identity and reality itself. This piece of meta-fiction would make for a great meta-film done by the likes of Darren Aronofsky or Christopher Nolan.

Status: Not in development

Detailing the life of a German Holocaust doctor, Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow is a postmodern masterpiece told in reverse chronological order. Don’t worry, though, this isn’t just a gimmick. The style of the book is fully realized and completely disorienting, but in a good way. It begins, naturally, with his death and slowly pulls back to reveal his entire life, including his atrocities during the Holocaust.

It’s stunning and confusing as the doctor views his life in reverse from afar, and believes this to be the natural order of things. We’ve seen this type of storytelling device before in movies like Memento and Irreversible, so it is possible to be done in a way that is more than just coherent, but worthy of critical acclaim as well.

Status: Not in development

Kerouac’s work hasn’t had the best track record of being made into decent movies, but The Dharma Bums would make for a great flick if tackled by someone who really knows the material. Taking place years after On the Road, The Dharma Bums further explores Kerouac’s life (under the character name of Ray Smith here) and his concurrent penchant for the wilderness as well as the party circuit. It also chronicles his introduction to Buddhism, which is easily the book’s most interesting aspect.

This is a character odyssey without a doubt, but Kerouac’s voice is so strong and his ideas so unique that it would be able to carry an entire film without much deviation from the source material. We’re pretty sure that Johnny Depp has called dibs on every Kerouac movie that comes out, so we just assume he’ll have to star in the movie, but his star power would make it easier for this to get green lit in the first place.

Status: Not in development

There have been underwhelming short films and foreign versions of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but none have truly captured the brilliance of the novel. The premise is simple: A traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes up in bed one day to discover that he had transformed into a hideous insect overnight. Everything and everyone else in his life is just as it was, but he is not. He instantly becomes a burden to his family members, who all have to start working again in order to make up for the income that Gregor has lost as a result of being bedridden.

It’s an incredibly curious story that can be interpreted in any number of ways, and directors like David Lynch and David Cronenberg would be a perfect fit for a project like this. It shouldn’t be a short film or an updated version of the novel. It should be just as Kafka wrote it nearly a century ago.

Status: Not in development

Before his untimely death in 2008, David Foster Wallace was one of the preeminent writers in American literature, and his novel Infinite Jest is seen by many to be his magnum opus. Dealing with themes of depression, addiction, advertising, modern culture, and basically anything else you can think of, Infinite Jest is a wonderfully sardonic take on our current world and its addictions.

It’s amazing that such an acclaimed novel has never been attempted in film form. Could it be because most of the things that Hollywood holds dear, like advertising and mindless entertainment, are thoroughly mocked throughout the novel? Maybe the gargantuan length of the novel scares off executives? No matter what the excuse is, somebody out there needs to get over it and put this book in front of cameras soon.

Status: Not in development

It’s considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, yet no Hollywood studio has ever attempted a big screen adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The story chronicles the life of a human who was born on Mars and raised by Martians but then returns to Earth as a young adult. It is one of the rare sci-fi books that transcends the genre and becomes universally acclaimed by nearly everyone that has ever read it.

The book challenges and explores every societal norm that we hold dear, and it does so with an eye towards intellectualism and objectivity. There is a lot going on in this novel, but we can’t help but think that it would make a great film.

Status: Not in development

Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler Studies at a local university, he is married to his fourth wife, Babette, and he has four children. Both Jack and his wife are petrified of death, so it certainly doesn’t bode well for them when a chemical spill creates a noxious black cloud over their hometown. In order to quell their fears, Jack and Babette turn to Dylar, a fictional drug that removes the user’s fear of death.

White Noise is a brilliant piece of postmodern madness in which author Don DeLillo completely tears down the veneer of American life and explores the dark underbelly of our modern world and its chemical dependency. With tongue firmly in cheek, DeLillo’s work resonates just as much now, if not more, than it did when it was released in 1985. This is a book that wouldn’t just make an entertaining movie, but an important one as well. Be sure to take your ADHD pills and focus up.

Status: Not in development

In Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, a detective named Thursday Next lives in an alternate version of Great Britain that is a veritable police state. Here, cloning is common, time travel is the norm, and literature is treated as a religion. After an original copy of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzelwit is stolen, Thursday must track down the thief before he can change or disrupt the novel in any way.

During the course of the novel, classic characters from literature are kidnapped or killed, and timeless novels are irrevocably changed. Fforde’s work is fast-paced and inventive, with sharp humor on nearly every page. The prospect of an Eyre Affair movie is simply too tantalizing to pass up and it’s shocking to us that a film adaptation has never even been rumored.

Status: Not in development

It’s one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, yet no one in Hollywood has ever really attempted to turn Gabriel García Márquez's classic into a film. Taking place over a century and spanning multiple generations of the Buendía family, 100 Years of Solitude revolves around the formation and eventual devastation of the fictional town of Macondo.

There are countless characters, endless symbolism, and plenty of historical allusions to real-life Colombia here, and any director would have to have nerves of steel to take this adaptation head-on. However, with the right script, this story could be one of the best ever put on screen.

Status: Tentatively being produced for TV

Fantasy at its best, Gaiman's novel pits the gods of old against the gods of the modern world in a spiritual battle for society's very soul. It’s filled with great characters, brilliant ideas, and the writing itself just flows like fresh silk.

We fully acknowledge that this would be complicated to film. There would be numerous characters to give substantial attention to, intense special effects would be needed, and the pure density of the novel would necessitate the movie being well over two hours long. But if done with some tender love and care, American Gods would make for an absolutely fascinating movie. There have been recent rumors of the novel being made into a series on HBO, but that was nearly a year ago with no further updates since. Personally, we think if American Gods was to be adapted, it would need to be seen on the big screen.

Status: Stalled for now

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay chronicles the lives of two Jewish artists who create the world’s greatest comic book superhero, The Escapist. In a world where every superhero property is being whored out and put on screen by the Hollywood machine, it’s maddening to think that this modern masterpiece still hasn’t been adapted into the movie that everyone knows it should be.

Taking its cues from the lives of real comic book talent like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, and Jim Steranko, this novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. It explores the racial tensions during the early 20th century, the ins and outs of the comic book industry, and even homosexuality. It is an incredibly beautiful novel that can easily be enjoyed by people who have never picked up a comic book in their life, as well as lifelong fans of the funnybooks.

For a while it seemed like a movie adaptation was all but inevitable, but little progress has been made over the years and the project looks like it’s dead in the water as of now. It’s a shame, because the project would fit a director like Ron Howard or Martin Scorsese like a snug pair of tights.

Status: Seemingly on hold

The first part of Isaac Asimov’s sprawling Foundation series would be a colossal undertaking for any movie studio, but if some executives would just get behind it and hire some visionary talent, it could also be a game changer of Avatar proportions. Foundation is set in a futuristic world where a group of scientists take it upon themselves to preserve the knowledge of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire as the society around them begins to devolve into barbarism.

There was a brief moment of fear when Roland Emmerich was hired to direct an adaptation of the novel in early 2010, but there hasn't been much forward movement to speak of since. Hopefully we never hear his name attached to the film ever again. Any director who takes this project on has to respect the intellectualism that Asimov brought to the novel. It shouldn’t just be a big-budget sci-fi action extravaganza. Then again, we’re talking about Hollywood here, so we're not holding our breath.

Status: Perpetually in development

The works of Philip K. Dick have filled movie screens for decades now. Films like Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, and Total Recall are all based off of Dick’s novels and short stories, but unfortunately his most complex and ambiguous novel, Ubik, is still rotting in development hell. The novel itself is an existential journey that explores the very nature of what we perceive as reality and death. It's also wickedly funny and incredibly in-depth.

This isn’t typical Hollywood sci-fi with ray-guns and alien spaceships. Instead, Ubik is an intellectual novel that is just as much about spirituality as it is about science. With a cast of eclectic characters, talking corpses, and a God that comes in the form of an aerosol spray can, Ubik has all of the features necessary to be a great movie.

Status: Not in development

Like all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, a big-screen adaptation of Cat’s Cradle would have to be reworked heavily by a screenwriter in order for it to be filmable. Some elements of the plot would need to be pulled back, and some of Vonnegut’s more manic tangents might need to be tamed, but the movie would work; we're not doubting that for a second.

With its brilliant humor and scary accurate portrayal of our violent world, there is a chance that Cat’s Cradle could wind up being the Dr. Strangelove of the 21st century. There were rumors years ago about Leonardo DiCaprio being linked to a movie adaptation, but any hope of that seeing the light of day has seemingly disappeared into the Hollywood vapor.

Status: Not in development

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the funniest novels that you will ever read. It’s filled with memorable characters and a plot that will certainly keep you engrossed; unfortunately, Hollywood always seems to fail at adapting it. Harold Ramis was close, but John Belushi’s death sidetracked the project; David Gordon Green was closer, but Paramount dragged its feet for too long and now the movie is dead. Throughout the years, actors like John Goodman, and Will Ferrell have all been tapped to play the iconic role of Ignatius J. Reilly, a slothful 30-year-old who has adventures in New Orleans' French Quarter while reluctantly attempting to find a job, yet no studio has ever taken advantage of their eagerness.

If it ever does see the light of day, A Confederacy of Dunces would be one of the most high-brow comedies to come from Hollywood in years. We wouldn't want to see “Happy Madison Productions” flash on the screen before the opening credits, and we certainly don’t want so see “Directed By The Farrelly Brothers” either. Nothing should be dumbed down here, as the novel is too near-and-dear to lit fans everywhere to just be bastardized like that.

A director like Matthew Vaughn would be perfect for this movie, given his experience with offbeat ensembles and humor. And the role of Ignatius Reilly seems tailor-made for either Jorge Garcia or Zach Galifianakis to take on. We can always dream, right?

Status: Not in development

We can already hear the protests by literary fans everywhere, and we simply don’t care. It might sound blasphemous, but we would love to see Catcher in the Rye finally hit theaters. Long thought to be “unfilmable,” the classic tale of Holden Caulfield’s odyssey through the world of phonies and his impending adulthood is one of the greatest American novels of all time. But it's because of that very acclaim that filmmakers and studios have been hesitant to ever adapt it for the screen.

However, we can’t help but feel that someone like Wes Anderson (who is a self-proclaimed Salinger fan) could do Catcher in the Rye justice. He has all of the offbeat sensibilities to make this work, and he is already an admirer of the material itself. He probably already has the entire movie planned out in his mind, including who he wants to cast as Caulfield. And much to the chagrin of movie executives everywhere, Shia LaBeouf and Michael Cera probably aren't on the top of his list.

Hollywood has already made two Garfield movies and an Alvin and the Chipmunks trilogy. Execs should at least attempt to get this off the ground.