Hollywood and the Stories That Will Never Die

As a screenwriter something I think about often is; what is a story that I want to tell that I will also be able to sell? There are quite a few stories that Hollywood never seems to get tired of, ones that always seem to sell. Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz. Now what about these stories makes them so special and why do filmmakers keep coming back to them?

Well the most obvious answer to this is that all of these stories are in the public domain. When writers are searching for ideas, the public domain is the easiest way to show the world that we have the ability to put our spin on existing stories. It also challenges us to come up with a new twist as well as alleviating the challenge of coming up with an entirely new story. These specific stories also offer many options and opportunities for writers to explore a different part of the story.

These stories also inspire a level of wonder, for the audience. Sherlock and Dracula inspire the feeling of unattainability. Whether it be intelligence or immortality, audiences see something on screen that they want to see in themselves. Obviously the best adaptation of Sherlock is the BBC television show, but there are also the films with Robert Downey Jr. and Elementary. Clearly there are more but in the last decade these are the most prominent and popular. Dracula has also had a million and one adaptations more than 200 to be more exact but the most recent ones are the Dracula series from 2020, Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing and The Invitation, the last being the best of the three. Clearly the idea of intelligent, and immortal beings are a huge draw for audiences. These films and television projects are in excess because Hollywood knows that they will sell, and if they saturate the market audiences will inevitably compare them and therefore they will watch most of the projects available.

Oz and Wonderland inspire dreams of adventures, of being swept away and are a perfect escape from the real world. All of these stories are also things first experienced through childhood and adolescence for most people, so they also bring a sense of nostalgia. Now these two projects have significantly less adaptations collectively then the previous two we’ve talked about but they are still enduring projects. These stories seem to inspire less liberties with the original source material, as most adaptations are just that, more or less direct adaptations. Once again because these worlds are so extensive and there is so much material to explore that writers don’t need to inject as much originality into the story. Another reason these are more direct adaptations are once again due to the fact that these stories are in the public domain.

Overall I don’t necessarily think that the redoing of these stories is a bad thing. I think that if that's all you are doing, you aren’t an artist or a real creator but as an exploration of creativity I think they are an excellent exercise as a writer. I also think that the ability to put a new and inventive spin on an old and arguably overdone story is an incredible feat of writing and imagination. I also think that as a writer who wants to break into the industry there is no harm in writing something that has a high probability of selling, as long as the film is well thought out and developed. I am personally working on a Dracula story that is a little different, vampires in particular have a hold over society but that is an entirely different article.