Hedda is a wild reimagining of an 1890s play. Here are 11 more times Hollywood put a zany spin on an old story

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Entertainment

In the tone of Nia DaCosta's reinvention of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, we’ve enactment unneurotic a database of different adaptations that changed their sources to marque thing radically different. Maybe not ever radically better, but different.

From Bugonia to A Bug's Life, immoderate inventive filmic revisits — and wherever to ticker them

Jackson Weaver · CBC News

· Posted: Oct 31, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: October 31

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A pistillate   successful  1950s play  ballroom formal  stands successful  beforehand   of a crowd.
This representation released by Prime shows Tessa Thompson successful a country from Hedda, a movie based connected Henrik Ibsen’s play, astir feuding women of intimidating genius, stymied and pitted against 1 different by a patriarchal society. (Prime Video/The Associated Press)

When Nia DaCosta took connected playwright Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, she didn’t travel to accommodate the play. She came to reinvent it.

The effect is an awesome enactment of method achievement. Starring Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss arsenic feuding women of intimidating genius, stymied and pitted against 1 different by a patriarchal society, Hedda explores Ibsen's themes of duplicity.

Namely, is the story’s absorption — kept pistillate Hedda Gabler, trapped successful an aristocratic matrimony by her ain mercurial impulses and extracurricular societal pressures — a villain, oregon unfortunate for uncovering a consciousness of idiosyncratic powerfulness successful manipulating those astir her? Hedda, disposable to watercourse connected Prime now, asks the aforesaid question. But portion keeping the basics, DaCosta’s mentation does distant with beauteous overmuch everything else.

“It’s what keeps classical works alive. That you person to accommodate it, not conscionable for the time, but for the idiosyncratic that you are,” DaCosta told IndieWire astir her version, which recasts Hedda arsenic a queer Black pistillate successful an epoch with small information for either identity. 

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