The Most Anticipated Book-to-Screen TV and Movie Adaptations Coming in 2024

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One of Hollywood's oldest and most popular practices has been taking stories from the page and bringing them to life on screen in movies and on TV, and that's not something studios will stop doing any time soon. In fact, 2024 is already looking pretty jam-packed with book adaptations in theaters and on streaming.

Below, we'll take a look at some of our most anticipated upcoming adaptations in the new year, along with links to the source material so you can get ahead of the game if you so choose — seeing how a story changed in the adaptation can be a lot of fun, and very illuminating from a creative standpoint. Let's see what we've got.

Boy Swallows Universe

Jan. 11 on Netflix

This semi-autobiographical novel by author Trent Dalton is a coming-of-age story about an Australian kid whose mom is in jail and whose stepdad deals heroin. This Netflix limited series stars Travis Fimmel, Simon Baker and Phoebe Tonkin. You can grab the novel in hardback or Kindle.

Masters of the Air

Jan. 26 on Apple TV+

Apple's adaptation of the story of an American fighter squadron in World War II is essentially a spiritual successor to Band of Brothers and The Pacific with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks once again producing. But this is a star-studded affair in front of the camera as well, with Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan headlining the cast. The original book, however, is an oddity for this list because it's more of a history book than a novel — and it's a compelling read for how it demystifies the experiences these pilots went through. This isn't the sort of story that romanticizes the people it's focusing on. Sign up for Apple TV+.

Expats

Jan. 26 on Prime Video

The Farewell director Lulu Wang helms this Amazon Prime Video adaptation of Janet Y.K. Lee's The Expatriates, starring Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo as the title characters — three American women living in Hong Kong who form a close bond with each other as they each experience their own serious existential issues. Sign up for Prime Video.

Shogun 

Feb. 27 on FX and Feb. 28 on Hulu

The classic novel about an Englishman living in 17th century Japan is getting the prestige TV treatment from FX and Hulu — this show looks expensive. That's exactly what a beloved epic like Shogun deserves, though it'll be tough to distill the 1000-plus pages of this book down to its essence because it's not just long, it's dense too. A story deserving of the title "classic." Sign up for Hulu.

Dune Part Two 

March 1 in movie theaters

The much-hyped second part of Denis Villaneuve's adaptation of Dune was delayed during this summer's tandem Hollywood strikes. Can Part Two replicated the surprise success of the first film, which pulled in a very respectable box office haul despite a simultaneous streaming release on HBO Max? Now's a great time to refresh yourself on the novels ahead of the sequel's March release date.

The Three Body Problem 

March 21 on Netflix

After a brief flirtation with Star Wars, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are finally delivering their first major project since wrapping up their HBO mega-hit in 2019. This Chinese novel is considered a fairly tough read for Westerners, and thus a tall task to adapt for a TV show aimed primarily at a global audience — can Benioff and Weiss pull it off?

Mickey 17 

March 29 in theaters

This quirky sci-fi tale — retitled Mickey 17 in the movie version — focuses on a disposable clone named Mickey7 who goes missing while scouting a new planet during a colonization mission, and is given up for dead and replaced by a new clone, Mickey8. But it turns out Mickey7 is still alive, and the fate of the colony rests with him — but now that he's officially redundant, he'll be killed by his own people if they found out he's alive. The big-screen adaptation, from Parasite director Bong-joon Ho and starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey, will be a must-see movie and likely a major awards contender.

Bridgerton Season 3

May 16 on Netflix

Romancing Mister Bridgerton is the basis for the upcoming third season of the hit Netflix series Bridgerton, which will focus on the budding relationship between Colin Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington. They actually skipped a book — this one is the fourth in the series — which makes us wonder what kind of new wrinkles this adaptation might introduce to the story.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 

May 24 in theaters

Planet of the Apes has been a movie franchise for so long (55 years!) that it's easy to forget the French novel by Pierre Boulle that spawned the whole thing. Amusingly, despite being the fourth movie in the rebooted Apes franchise, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes looks like we're finally arriving at the time of the original story, in a world where talking apes rule and mute humans drool. Pretty exciting!

The Garfield Movie 

May 24 in theaters

It's been a while since Bill Murray voiced the famous orange cat in the previous Garfield animated movies, and now we're getting a very different vibe with Chris Pratt as Garfield's new voice. It's anybody's guess how that will end up going, but it's a good excuse to revisit the comic strip via this massive collection of creator Jim Davis' favorite full-color Sunday strips.

Wicked 

Nov. 27 in movie theaters

The beloved book-turned-stage musical that upends everything you thought you knew about The Wizard of Oz is finally being adapted as a movie with Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, and we can't wait to experience "Defying Gravity" in a movie theater. The book by Gregory Maguire that inspired the phenomenon is super interesting even without musical numbers for how it treats the story of The Wizard of Oz with more care and seriousness than that story took itself.

Nosferatu 

Dec. 25 in movie theaters

Director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) is set to deliver his own moody and atmospheric take on this old unofficial retelling of Dracula, starring the always-creepy Bill Skarsgard as Count Orlok. The original Nosferatu film, released more than a century ago, was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, which always gave this version of the story a unique flavor.

The Boys Season 4

Premiere date TBD on Amazon Prime Video

Amazon's hit adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic has served as a great cynical and satirical counterpoint to Marvel and DC's vision of big-screen superheroes. When you're sick to death of normal comic book movies, The Boys hits the spot, and with the MCU and DC Films both experiencing significant downturns right now, that will probably be even more true in 2024. But if you just can't wait, you can grab the paperback omnibus collections of The Boys for a very good price: in the $20-25 price range for each book. Sign up for Prime Video.

House of the Dragon Season 2

Premiere date TBD on HBO

The source material for the Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon is actually a sort of in-universe history book called Fire & Blood, written from the perspective of some stodgy old maester — meaning it has a subjective point of view with intentional holes that the show is able to subvert by showing the "real" version of history. In that sense, House of the Dragon is a rare adaptation where reading the book version is almost a requisite part of the experience, because otherwise you lose that subversive element a little bit.

Interior Chinatown

Premiere date TBD on Hulu

This satirical parody of the way Hollywood treats actors of color, and people of Asian descent specifically, written by longtime TV writer Charles Yu, won the National Book Award in 2020, and the TV treatment on Hulu is set to star comedian Jimmy O. Yang with Taika Waititi directing an episode. Yu is in a fairly unusual position on this one as both the author of the source material and the showrunner of the adaptation. Sign up for Hulu.

The Perfect Couple

Premiere date TBD on Netflix

A young woman is about to marry into a wealthy New England family when a corpse turns up at the wedding, setting the stage for a twisty family drama/murder mystery. The cast for this Netflix series is pretty stacked, with Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, Dakota Fanning, Jack Reynor, and Omar Epps starring.

Rivals

Premiere date TBD on Hulu

This raucous tale of bad behavior by the British elite in the 1980s by author Jilly Cooper is getting a series adaptation on Disney+ in the UK, though it will likely end up on Hulu in the US given the decidedly adult subject matter. Sign up for Hulu.

The Sympathizer

Premiere date TBD on HBO

This Vietnam War-era black comedy spy thriller, about a Vietnamese communist who infiltrates the Southern Vietnamese military and then lives in America after the war won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2016, and the HBO series adaptation is being co-run and directed by the outstanding Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, best known for Oldboy and Snowpiercer. That's as good a pedigree as just about any movie or show coming out in 2024.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2

Premiere date TBD on Amazon Prime Video

The first season of Amazon's Lord of the Rings prequel series was pretty divisive, as it's not completely faithful to the established lore from Tolkien's supplementary materials, though I personally enjoyed it greatly — it was really cool to see Middle-Earth's history play out in ways we didn't expect. But given the response, it'll be very interesting to see if Prime Video changes course in any obvious ways. While the Lord of the Rings novels are always good reading, The Rings of Power is actually an adaption of The Silmarilion, which is a sort of collection of Lord of the Rings mythology that details the backstory of Middle-earth before the events of the trilogy. If you've never read it, it'll definitely change the way you look at the entire series. Sign up for Prime Video.

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