Literary adaptations have always been popular on the big screen, though every year it seems they’re more popular than ever. Most of them are based on novels, or novel series, which only makes sense—there’s often a ton of material to work with—and things usually have to be cut, but when movies are based on short stories, there’s the trickier business of expansion.
I did my best to limit this list to films truly adapted from single short stories, excluding adaptations of groups of stories (like Julieta), adaptations of full collections, and adaptations of novellas or anything else long enough to be typically published as a standalone book (other than as a film tie-in), which means you won’t see Stand By Me (a.k.a The Body) or The Shawshank Redemption (both novellas collected in King’s Different Seasons, by the way, along with Apt Pupil and The Breathing Method—adaptation coming in 2020) or Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Arrival (a.k.a. Story of Your Life) here, though they are often included in similar lists.
As a point of interest, I’ve also compared the lengths of the original short stories to the lengths of their film adaptations, and organized them from widest to least difference—but be warned that editions vary, so the page lengths listed here are from whatever book I could get my hands on (or preview online) and may not match your own version. Hopefully, they’re all at least in range.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel” (1948), published in Ten Story Fantasy as “Sentinel of Eternity” (1951)
Length of short story: 8 pages
Length of film: 161 minutes
Minutes per page: 20.125
Strangely, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey at the same time, both based in part on Clarke’s “The Sentinel,” which was originally written for a BBC contest (it was not a finalist). Though it seems Clarke would have objected to this characterization of the relationship of story to film. In a 1984 issue of Heavy Metal he wrote: “I am continually annoyed by careless references to “The Sentinel” as “the story on which 2001 is based”; it bears about as much relation to the movie as an acorn to the resultant full-grown oak. (Considerably less, in fact, because ideas from several other stories were also incorporated.) Even the elements that Stanley Kubrick and I did actually use were considerably modified.” Still, he refers to the story as “the seed from which 2001: A Space Odyssey sprang, twenty years after it was written,” so we’ll let it squeak through on a technicality. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/31-movies-based-on-short-stories/
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