Do We Really Need Another 'Sense and Sensibility'? Hollywood’s Jane Austen Obsession Explained
By Romey Norton - September 21, 2026
Jane Austen has been dead for 209 years, and she is, without question, still the busiest woman in Hollywood. This September and October, Focus Features rolls out yet another take on Sense and Sensibility, this time starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood, with Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne and George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, landing in UK cinemas September 25 and the US on October 16. Directed by Georgia Oakley from a script by novelist Diana Reid, it arrives with the unenviable task of following a film most people consider untouchable: Ang Lee's 1995 version, screenplay by Emma Thompson, who also starred and won an Oscar for the writing.
The 1995 Sense and Sensibility made about $135 million worldwide on a $16 million budget, picked up seven Oscar nominations, and is the kind of film people rewatch annually like a family tradition. It didn't just adapt Austen; it defined how a generation pictures her. Throw a stone at any "best period dramas ever" list, and it's there, usually near the top, sitting comfortably next to Colin Firth emerging from a lake in the BBC's 1995 Pride and Prejudice, or Joe Wright's 2005 Pride & Prejudice, which turned a modest budget into roughly $121 million worldwide and gave us the hand-flex heard round the world. Even Autumn de Wilde's 2020 Emma, pastel, sharp, criminally underseen, proved there was still juice in the Austen orange, if not quite blockbuster juice.
So why keep going back to the well? A few honest reasons, none of them purely sentimental. Austen's plots are, frankly, bulletproof. Marriage plots with real financial stakes, biting social commentary, and endings that feel earned rather than convenient. That's a screenwriter's dream: the structure is already there, the IP is public domain, and the built-in audience shows up whether the reviews are glowing or lukewarm. Costume dramas are also relatively cheap to make and reliably profitable against their budgets, which matters enormously to studios still nervous after a rough few years at the box office. And there's a genuine generational churn; every fifteen or twenty years, a new set of viewers wants their own Austen, not their mum's. Which is fair. Except when the "own" version doesn't actually bring anything new to the table besides a fresher cast and a moodier colour grade.
That's really the crux of the remake debate: not whether we're "allowed" to revisit Austen, but whether each new version earns its existence. A reinterpretation with a genuine point of view, a different emphasis, a sharper eye on class or grief, an actual directorial choice, justifies itself. A handsome but interchangeable rethread just makes you want to rewatch Emma Thompson instead. Whether Oakley's Sense and Sensibility lands on the right side of that line, we'll find out this autumn.
Here's the more interesting question, though: while Hollywood keeps circling the same six Austen novels like gulls around a chip shop, there's a whole shelf of classic literature gathering dust that would make gorgeous, sellable films. A few underrated candidates:
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters: Yes, there's a beloved 1999 BBC miniseries, but no theatrical version has ever properly capitalised on this story of stepsisters, science, and social climbing in a way that reaches a big-screen audience.
Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: A satire of financial fraud and social ambition so cutting it could be repackaged as a prestige drama tomorrow and nobody would blink.
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Gothic, twisty, genuinely unsettling, practically begging for the moody A24 treatment.
George Eliot's Middlemarch: Endlessly quotable, structurally rich, and arguably more ambitious than anything Austen wrote, yet it's had shockingly little screen love since the 1994 miniseries.
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth: There was a 2000 film, but it's ripe for rediscovery, especially with today's appetite for stories about women crushed by social expectation.
None of these need Austen's name attached to work; they just need a studio willing to bet on something other than the safest possible sell. Until then, expect the Dashwoods to keep moving house every couple of decades, sense and sensibility fully intact, box office receipts mostly cooperating.
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Romey Norton
Senior Writer
Romey is a senior writer for Film Focus Online, covering the latest film reviews, news, features, and interviews, with a passion for all things cinema.
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