From Literary Classic to IP Asset: A Study on the Industrialization of The Great Gatsby’s Centennial Film Adaptations

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_20How to use a DOI?

Keywords

The Great Gatsby; Cultural Industries; Film adaptation

Abstract

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has been adapted into five film and television works by Hollywood, spanning the silent film era to the age of digital spectacle. This phenomenon of repeated adaptation over a century cannot be fully explained by literary aesthetics or thematic timelessness. From the perspective of cultural industries, this paper takes the adaptation history of The Great Gatsby as a case study to examine how American literary classics are transformed into film and television IP assets. The study finds that repeated adaptation treats literary works as renewable cultural capital. The studio system in different historical periods, based on technological conditions, market trends, and audience expectations, strategically reshapes narratives, reworks genres, and upgrades audiovisual quality, thereby achieving continuous value appreciation and cross media realization of the IP. This paper selects four representative versions from 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2013 as analytical objects, examines the industrial logic embodied by each version, reveals how American cultural industries transform a novel into a repeatedly realizable IP asset, and provides a reference for the development of Chinese literary IPs.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinghan Li
AU  - Chi Huang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/30
TI  - From Literary Classic to IP Asset: A Study on the Industrialization of The Great Gatsby’s Centennial Film Adaptations
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 8th International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 169
EP  - 176
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_20
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_20
ID  - Li2026
ER  -