Hollywood’s Forgotten How to Make Movies Like The Count of Monte Cristo

Is there a more purely entertaining novel in the classic literary canon than Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo? Many have abridged it and updated it and riffed on it over the decades. In TV and film, there have been Indian versions, Chinese versions, Mexican versions, Sri Lankan versions, Korean versions, Turkish versions, to go with the multitudinous French and American versions. That central premise — of betrayal, followed by self-improvement...