Disney Plus original Peter Pan & Wendy recently came under fire for marking the third big budget retelling of the iconic story in the space of just 20 years, but spare a thought for director Martin Bourboulon’s ambitious The Three Musketeers, which ranks as the 29th feature-length adaptation Alexandre Dumas’ novel.
That’s not even counting the additional methods in which the legendary tale has been told across television, radio, comic books, or video games, either, so the filmmaker faced one hell of a task in trying to put a fresh spin on some of the most well-worn narrative material the industry has ever encountered.
Even more ambitiously, though, it’s only the first half of a two-part extravaganza, with The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan being followed by concluding chapter Milady in December, a result of an epic undertaking that shot back-to-back across 150 days of production. Not only that, but there are also two small screen spin-offs in the works, so we’re getting a full-blown cinematic universe out of the equation.
Nobody was asking for yet another film based on The Three Musketeers, but given that D’Artagnan holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 96 percent and is currently flying high as one of the most-watched titles on iTunes this week per FlixPatrol, it’s becoming increasingly evident that there’s still an audience out there for one of the most heavily-adapted works of fiction there’s ever been.
That’s both a testament to Dumas’ enduring classic, and the ongoing dearth of ideas that means anything with name recognition is always in danger of being repurposed ad nauseum.