The cinema took possession of Jules Verne’s work very early on. In 1902, Georges Méliès drew inspiration from it for his A Trip to the Moon. In 1912, Michel Verne, the author’s son, signed a contract with Éclair Films, assigning the company the rights to adapt eight of his father’s novels including In Search of the Castaways.
It was the American film industry, however, that renewed the general public’s interest in Jules Verne, thanks to its screenwriters, famous stars and the major technical and financial resources called upon, sometimes at the price of somewhat distorting the author’s original intentions. In the 1950s, numerous cinematic adaptations of Verne’s novels were released. These American films did much to help establish his reputation as an author of science-fiction novels. Walt Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, directed by Richard Fleischer (1954), marked the beginning of the great boom in Vernian cinema’s popularity.
The posters for these films bear witness to Hollywood’s championing of Verne’s body of work. Nonetheless, they tend to highlight episodes and characters born of their screenwriters’ imaginations rather than the author’s. Hence, unlike the novel, the film of Around the World in 80 Days produced by Michael Todd (1956) features a balloon carrying Phileas Fogg and Passepartout in its basket. Although the Hollywood films of the 1950s contributed a great deal to making Jules Verne a household name once again, they were also essentially made for commercial entertainment, freely reinterpreting his novels in order to better match them to an international audience’s expectations, often leaving their scientific, political and philosophical aspects to one side in the process.