According to the New York Daily News, Natalie Portman will produce and star in a film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The book is a mash-up that takes Jane Austen’s famous regency romance Pride and Prejudice and adds, well, zombies. (Everything is better with zombies.)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and its thematic sibling Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, make one of the best arguments for a thriving public domain. The mash-up possibilities are endless.
Of course, apart from mash-ups, modern-day sequels can be written to those old stories, too. One of my favorites is Thomas F. Monteleone’s The Secret Sea, in which it turns out that the stories of Jules Verne are based on happenstances from an alternate dimension. Alas, it apparently is not available as an e-book.