The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005 film)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a BBC Radio 4 sitcom that ran for two series between 1978 and 1980, then became a novel in 1979, a BBC television series in 1981 and a text adventure game in 1984. A film was talked about almost from the start. Adams turned down early approaches in the 1970s because he feared the studios wanted "Star Wars with jokes," then signed an option in 1982 with producers Ivan Reitman, Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross and wrote three scripts for them. Dan Aykroyd pitched Reitman a different story in the meantime, and that project became Ghostbusters. The rights were sold in 1997 to Caravan Pictures, which became Spyglass Entertainment, and the film went quiet again.

Around 2001 director Jay Roach, using the clout of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, secured a new deal with Adams through Disney, and Adams wrote a fresh script. Then, on 11 May 2001, Adams died. Roach brought in Karey Kirkpatrick to finish the screenplay from Adams' final draft and the notes he had left, and when Roach himself stepped back, Spike Jonze recommended Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, the team known as Hammer & Tongs. Shooting wrapped in August 2004. The finished film carries a screenplay credit shared by Adams and Kirkpatrick and is dedicated to Adams.

It opened on 28 April 2005 in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and a day later in the United States and Canada. Martin Freeman is Arthur Dent, the Englishman who wakes to find first his house and then his planet scheduled for demolition; Mos Def is his alien friend Ford Prefect, Sam Rockwell the newly elected President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, Zooey Deschanel the Earth woman Trillian, Bill Nighy the planet builder Slartibartfast and John Malkovich Zaphod's rival Humma Kavula. Stephen Fry narrates as the Guide itself, Helen Mirren voices the supercomputer Deep Thought, and Alan Rickman voices Marvin the depressed android while Warwick Davis wears the suit. The Vogons were built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and Simon Jones, the original radio and TV Arthur, turns up in a cameo. Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, the answer is still 42, and a whale and a bowl of petunias still fall out of the sky.

The film opened at number one in North America and finished with a little over $104 million worldwide, with mainly positive reviews that still divided between those who found it faithful in spirit and critics who found it heavier-footed than the source. Freeman later said Jennings told him it had not done well enough to earn a sequel. What it did do was send a new wave of readers back to the books.