5 Great Books That Almost Became Movies (But Didn’t)

When a novel becomes a bestseller or a critical darling, it’s often only a matter of time before it is picked up by Hollywood and adapted for the big screen. Literary adaptations are big business too, with the likes of the Harry Potter and James Bond franchises based on equally successful book series, and some of the biggest and most popular movies in movie history—Gone with the Wind, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Wizard of Oz, Jurassic Park, to name but a few—making the leap from the page to the screen. 

Sometimes, though, despite the sales and the literary cachet, some books never fully make that leap—five of which (and the reasons for their lack of big-screen adaptations) are explored here.

1. Paradise Lost by John Milton
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
4. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
5. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

Paradise Lost by John Milton

There’s no denying that John Milton’s epic retelling of the Fall of Man has the potential to make an extraordinary movie, and, needless to say, plenty of people around Hollywood have tried over the years. To date, though, all of them have failed—most notably in the early 2010s, when an action-movie adaptation was slated for production (with Bradley Cooper signed on to play Lucifer, and I, Robot director Alex Proyas behind the camera). 

But Proyas’ Paradise Lost, like all others pencilled into the Hollywood diary before it, has yet to get off the ground as the obvious challenges in adapting a poem that would require considerable violence (and nudity in the Garden of Eden) become apparent. “It’s a 400-some-odd-page poem written in Old English,” producer Vincent Newman explained in an interview with the New York Times when another adaptation of Paradise Lost was being shopped around Hollywood in 2004. “How do you find the movie in that?”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Coming-of-age classic The Catcher in the Rye is one of the best-selling books of the 20th century, with sales exceeding 65 million copies worldwide. Despite that popularity, however, the film has never been adapted for the big screen—seemingly in no small part due to its author’s reluctance to do so. 

Having already seen one of his works (the 1948 short story Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut) adapted for the cinema (as My Foolish Heart in 1949) only to be met with a drubbing from the critics, Salinger was seemingly not too keen to repeat the process with his most acclaimed and personal of books, and so spent decades turning down repeated offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye (despite interest from such high-profile filmmakers as Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, and Terence Mallick). Salinger, who died in 2010, did at least show interest in a posthumous adaptation, but whether one will ever come to fruition remains to be seen. As he wrote in the late 50s, “I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy… [but] it pleasures me no end… to know that I won’t have to see the results of the transaction.”

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s 1,000-page epic Infinite Jest has long been considered unfilmable (including by the author himself) due to its immense length, intricate prose and structure, and towering complexity. There have at least been a handful of attempts to bring the story to the big screen—most notably by Revenge of the Nerds actor Curtis Armstrong, who was commissioned by HBO (with Wallace’s blessing) to write an as-yet unused screenplay adaptation in the early 2000s. In the end, however, the project got nowhere, and whether Infinite Jest will ever make its way to the big screen remains to be seen. “We worked on it for a long time, handed it in, and that was the end of it,” Armstrong explained. “That’s just the way it goes.”

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Several of Cormac McCarthy’s novels have been adapted for the big screen, perhaps most remarkably No Country for Old Men, which won a raft of Oscars (including Best Picture) in 2008. His 1985 epic novel Blood Meridian, however, has yet to receive the same Hollywood treatment, despite decades of interest.

​The first attempt at a Blood Meridian screenplay came ten years after its publication, in 1995, when Breaking Away Oscar-winner Steve Tesich first took on the task of tackling McCarthy’s notoriously stylish prose, and the book’s bleak and unrelentingly bloody violence. The rights to the novel then fell into the hands of fellow Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones, who acquired the book in the late 90s and reworked Tesich’s script, intending to star in an adaptation himself. Again, though, the project got nowhere, and by the 2000s the book had been passed to Ridley Scott. Fresh off the success of Black Hawk Down, he wrote a new screenplay, but the producers balked at the movie’s grisly violence, and the project was once more abandoned. Most recently, James Franco has tried to get his own Blood Meridian movie in the works (even going so far as to post 25 minutes of test footage in 2014), but the project remains firmly on the shelf.

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

Considering that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have amassed billions of dollars in box office takings and a slew of Oscars, you might be forgiven for thinking that both Hollywood’s and the Tolkien estate’s eyes might now be turning to fan-favorite The Silmarillion—the sprawling collection of myths and tales that J.R.R. Tolkien began writing in the early 1900s, and which were published posthumously (with the assistance of his son, Christopher) in 1977. Aside from the sheer scale of adapting such a large collection of stories for cinema, however, it seems unlikely the book will ever find its way onto the big screen, with Jackson himself providing the reason.

“Tolkien sold the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s,” he explained at a Comic-Con in 2014, when he was asked about the prospect of a Silmarillion-shaped follow-up. “The Silmarillion wasn’t written yet. It wasn’t even written in his lifetime. It was written by him and, partly, his son finished it after his death and published it after the professor had died. So, the film rights are with them, and the estate doesn’t have any interest in discussing film rights with anybody.” Whether or not Jackson has indeed approached the estate about purchasing the rights remains unclear (although that quote would suggest so)—but with the Tolkien estate seemingly unwilling to part with them any time soon, it looks like the book will remain unfilmed for some time yet.