While Hollywood has been exploiting comic books and YA novels as intellectual property for a long time, French cinema has only recently begun to feed its wealth of 19th-century novels into the content machine, churning big-budget epics out of classic books in the public domain. Last year, a two-part version of Alexandre Dumas’ hit local screens, raking in $45 million off a combined $80 million budget for both films. Directed by Martin Bourboulon and featuring a who’s-who of Gallic stars, including Vincent Cassel, Eva Green, Romain Duris and Louis Garrel, the movies were marked by nonstop action and relentless storytelling tailor-made for the streaming age.
Both films were written by the duo of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, who previously helmed a series of hit comedies ( , , ) with a fast-paced Hollywood edge to them. They bring the same approach to , another certified Dumas classic whose sprawling 1,500 pages the directors manage to condense into a watchable, if rather unremarkable, three-hour epic filled with plenty of whiplash intrigue. Like Dickens, Dumas was a commercially successful writer specializing in serial narratives, with the bulk of his work published in weekly newspapers, then released later in book form.
You could say that he and other major French authors from the 1800s, including Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, who also exploited the weekly format, are the forefathers of the brand of serial storytelling that has become a standa.
