The Three Musketeers leads: 55 screen versions between 1909 and 2023, for a book of 226,061 words. The twenty titles below account for 342 versions between them, from silent-era one-reelers to films released this decade.
The pattern is not simply "great books get filmed". What travels is a premise a poster can carry: a monster, a detective, a trial, a bet, a woman with a secret. Psychological novels with long interior passages are filmed less often than their reputation suggests, and children’s books are filmed more. Where a book was adapted repeatedly, the earlier versions usually froze into the cultural memory and later ones argue with them.
Most screen versions first
41 books here have at least three screen versions we could verify; these are the twenty with the most, with the years each run of adaptations spans.
How this list was made
Each version is a Wikidata record stating that the film adapts this work, plus an IMDb title whose release year matches the year recorded for the version. Anything we could not check against both sources is left out, so these counts are floors, not totals.
"Screen versions" covers cinema features, television films, series and mini-series. Stage plays, radio dramas and audiobooks are not counted. The thirteen books with three or more versions each have their own comparison page; the rest carry a table on the book page.
Questions readers ask
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Part of the complete catalogue. Nearby: the longest classics · the shortest classics · the filmed classics index · themed reading lists · word counts and reading times.