Hayley breaks down the films and TV series based on books due to hit screens in the coming months.
Nosferatu
Vampires are totally having a comeback in the horror fiction world right now, and that trend is making its way over to film as well. Director Robert Eggers is following up his three acclaimed features (The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman) with an ambitious endeavour: a remake of the 1922 silent German classic Nosferatu. The original film was a pretty loose and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, changing a few names and details to focus on the sinister entanglement between an estate agent, his wife, and the vampire who descends upon their German town. The iconic bloodsucker Count Orlok will be played by the apparently unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård (nothing new for him, really), with Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe and Aaron Taylor-Johnson co-starring in the creepy gothic horror flick.
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodovar’s first ever English language film, The Room Next Door, won the top award—The Golden Lion—at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, drawing inspiration from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through. Powerhouse Oscar-winners Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star as Ingrid and Martha, two writers who, after being close in their twenties, have drifted apart, only to be reunited when Martha is diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants Ingrid’s company when she takes her own life in upstate New York. While the film isn't a very close adaptation of Nunez’s story, it makes a personal first English feature for Almodovar, as euthanasia was legalised in his native Spain in 2021, but is banned in the United States where the film is set.
Missing You
Netflix is continuing their almost-yearly run of Harlan Coben miniseries adaptations, and Harlen Coben is continuing his mission to single-handedly keep Richard Armitage employed, this being the actor's fourth appearance in a Coben-Netflix collaboration. Missing You is the latest series to come from Coben’s 14-book adaptation deal with the streamer, a concept so ridiculously emblematic of the current state of quantity-over-quality television that you just have to laugh, but I digress. Based on the author's 2014 standalone novel, the series stars Slow Horses alum Rosalind Eleazar as Kat Donovan, a detective inspector who, a decade after her fiancé mysteriously disappeared from her life, finds him on a dating app and is faced with a sudden plethora of secrets she must uncover.
Conclave
It’s a scandal in the Vatican! All Quiet On the Western Front director Edward Berger is back with another big Oscar contender, based on Robert Harris’s best-selling 2016 thriller Conclave. Ralph Fiennes stars as an English cardinal who, after the death of the Pope, organises the papal conclave to replace the figure, but gets more than he bargained for when he finds himself investigating and revealing a slew of secrets that are brought to light about the top candidates. Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini co-star in the film, which just picked up a Golden Globe for its screenplay. Having premiered at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival, critics claimed the film combines the pulpy entertainment of an airport thriller with high-suspense drama, which sounds like a winning combination to me.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bridget Jones is back again in what will presumably be her final jaunt, based on Mad About the Boy, the third book in Helen Fielding’s series, published 14 years after the sequel The Edge of Reason. Renee Zellweger is reprising her role as the icon of modern womanhood, alongside Hugh Grant as her former boyfriend Daniel Cleaver, and pretty much the entire supporting cast from the previous films. This time round, Bridget is newly widowed (Mark Darcy is dead?! Having only seen the first movie, I found this out recently when I saw the trailer in theatres before something else and was thoroughly baffled), a single mother of two, and trying to get back on the dating scene with a hot, young new love interest played by White Lotus season two breakout Leo Woodall.
The Monkey
Osgood Perkins divided horror fans across the globe in 2024 with his latest feature Longlegs, and while I was firmly in the not-for-me camp, I’m still interested to see what he does next. His follow-up is something strangely conventional on paper: a Stephen King adaptation. They’re a-dime-a-dozen these days; I should know, I write these posts. But if the trailer is anything to go by, Perkins is certainly bringing back his decidedly unconventional style and wit that made Longlegs nothing if not memorable. The Monkey is based on a short story of the same title from King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, focusing on twin brothers (both played by Theo James) who are haunted by a string of brutal deaths, from childhood into adulthood, after finding their father’s vintage toy monkey in the attic of their family home.
Add a comment to: Read It Before You See It 2025: Nosferatu, Bridget Jones and a bunch of prospective popes