Clockwise from top left:
Works based on Romeo and Juliet:
Anime and Manga
- Boarding School Juliet, a manga-turned-anime romantic comedy that takes a Japanese high school approach to the story, with the main characters being members of the Black Doggy and White Cats houses.
- Daimos: What if Romeo was the pilot of a Super Robot, Juliet was an Alien Princess, and Tybalt was a Warrior Prince who wanted to exterminate the entire human race?
- Romeo × Juliet, an anime adaptation set IN SPACE! with less Grey-and-Gray Morality (the Montagues are villains who ousted and all but extinguished the rightfully ruling Capulets)
Comic Books
- Prince of Cats, a short 2012 comic by Ron Wimberly set in a mid-Eighties Brooklyn crossed with samurai films and centered around secondary characters Tybalt and Rosalyn.
- A film adaptation has been announced, to star Lakeith Stanfield.
Film — Animated
- Pocahontas depicts a highly fictionalized romance between Pocahontas and John Smith in the midst of an upcoming war. The film was actually pitched as "Romeo & Juliet in 17th century Virginia". Notably it's one of Disney's only films to have a Bittersweet Ending (albeit where the lovers simply don't end up together as opposed to dying tragically).
- The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, which followed up the first film's Lighter and Softer African Hamlet with a similarly brighter version of this story. In Africa. With lions.
- Romie O and Julie 8, a 1979 animated TV adaptation with robots.
- Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss, an animated adaptation with seals playing the roles.
- Gnomeo & Juliet, a 2011 CGI animated family comedy film with living garden gnomes in place of the original characters.
Film — Live-Action
- Romeo and Juliet, a 1936 film directed by George Cukor that received four Academy Award nominations. Featured 34-year-old Norma Shearer and 43-year-old Leslie Howard playing the teenaged lovers.
- Romeo and Juliet, a 1954 film directed by Renato Castellani, starring Laurence Harvey and Susan Shentall in the title roles. Won a Leone d'Oro.
- Romeo and Juliet (1955), a filmed version of the Prokofiev ballet, performed by the Kirov Theatre.
- Romeo and Juliet (1968), a 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film starring Olivia Hussey as Juliet and Leonard Whiting as Romeo.
- William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, a somewhat polarizing update directed by Baz Luhrmann starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. It keeps Shakespeare's text but dramatically reframes it in a late-1990s setting in Mexican-influenced Southern California ("Verona Beach"). The duels and dialogue about them are retained by naming the characters' gun models after various types of bladed weapons instead (e.g., "Sword 9mm class").
- Romeo & Juliet (2013), a 2013 film by Carlo Carlei, and the first traditional retelling to hit screens in quite a while, starring Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth in the lead roles. The dialogue was heavily rewritten, although the new dialogue was still in the Shakespearean style. The rewrites were...not well received.
- Los Tarantos, a 1963 Spanish take on the story.
- Romeo Must Die, a modern-day retelling (from 2000) moving the action to LA and changing the feud to one between rival black and Chinese gangsters.
- China Girl (1987), which could be described as West Side Story meets Romeo Must Die. It's reset in 1980s Manhattan with rival Italian and Chinese gangs.
- Tromeo and Juliet, a typically outrageous outing from Troma Films with a rather different ending.
- Valley Girl from 1982 depicts the romance of Randy, a Hollywood punk, and Julie, the titular Valley Girl. The trope is even lampshaded by a scene where the couple kisses under a marquee advertising the play. The class warfare shown in the film is rather one-sided; the Hollywood crowd doesn’t actively go seeking trouble with the Valley kids, while the Valley kids are overtly hostile towards Randy and his friend Fred. The movie’s ending also subverts the tragic ending of the source material.
- Private Romeo, a film that uses an all-male cast and the original dialogue of the play as a commentary on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Romeo is a cadet desperate to get into West Point and Juliet is the new boy to the military academy he attends. Due to DADT, the school's staff finding out about the fact that the two are in love serves as their 'death;' no one actually dies in the film, but they'll both be kicked out of school and any hope of continuing their military careers (including Romeo's dream of West Point) is finished.
- Upside Down, starring Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst. A science fiction retelling where the two clans are replaced with inhabitants of two planets tightly revolving around each other. Where each person is only affected by the gravity of their birth planet.
- You Never Dreamed, a 1980 Soviet film.
- November 30, a 1995 Swedish movie with a Nonindicative Name where the Official Couple consists of a Peruvian immigrant and repentant neo-Nazi.
- Romeo Va Julietta Yohud Lan'atlangan Sevgi
, an Uzbek film from 2006, which loosely resets the story in contemporary Toshkent. - Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela is a 2013 Indian Hindi-language tragic romance film written and directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, which according to him, was a "desi adaptation" of this play.
- With a Kiss I Die, a 2018 lesbian vampire romance film based on the premise that Juliet was revived as a vampire.
- The Spruces and the Pines, an ION Channel Christmas movie, which has two young people falling in love despite the long-running feud between their families, who happen to own rival Christmas tree farms.
- Shakespeare in Love, in which we learn the "real" story behind the production of the play.
- Rosaline: a 2022 comedic film retelling the story from the point of view of Romeo's jilted Romantic False Lead, Juliet's cousin Rosaline.
- Pizza My Heart: A 2005 romantic comedy set in Verona (New Jersey, not Italy), with the Capulets and the Montagues represented by two rival pizzerias.
Literature
- Romeo and Juliet, a 1932 short story retelling by Karel Čapek.
- Unseen Academicals basically features "Romeo and Juliet as members of rival football supporter teams" as one of its sub-plots, with the characters of Trev Likely and Juliet Stollop. A lot of references to the play follow, though thankfully (though it takes a lot of work to get there) the ending is a lot happier.
- Prince of Shadows a 2014 novel by Rachel Caine, takes a Hero of Another Story approach, with Romeo's cousin Benvolio and Juliet's cousin Rosaline as the POV characters. Also adds a layer of horror by supposing that the catastrophic ending of the play was because the intensity of Romeo and Juliet's love was because the "plague on both your houses" was a backfiring curse, and Mercutio's line was him trying to warn Romeo. In the final climax of the book, as soon as Romeo and Juliet both die the curse falls on Benvolio and Rosaline as the next heirs in line. Their already being in love makes the difference in their feelings very clear, and illustrates that Romeo and Juliet were indeed doomed from the start.
- Diana Wynne Jones used the story as a subplot in The Magicians of Caprona in which the feuding families of Casa Montana and Casa Petrocchi eventually learn that two of their younger members have fallen in love with each other.
- Juliet, a 2010 novel by Anne Fortier, in which the main character discovers that her ancestor was the "real" Juliet behind the famous story.
- Romeo and/or Juliet uses the story as the basis for a gamebook with multiple possible plot strands. One path more-or-less follows the play, but make different choices and you can end up with very different endings.
- Romiette and Julio, a 2001 novel by Sharon Draper about two teenage lovers dealing with the taboos of interracial dating.
- Warm Bodies, a novel by Isaac Marion where the Montagues and Capulets are replaced with zombies and humans. Also made into a film.
- Mercedes Lackey's Closer to Home (part of The Heralds of Valdemar) has the plot revolve around expies of the Montagues and Capulets, told mostly from the point of view of the exasperated Heralds trying to keep them from killing each other. Provides quite a few Take That! s at the Montague and Capulet families in general, and the Nurse to boot. The Romeo expy turns out to be an unrepentant psychopath, who plans to marry the Juliet expy and kill off everyone else in their families in one fell horrific swoop, so he can inherit all the wealth and property.
Live-Action TV
- "Rosie, Oh, Rosie, Oh!", an episode of Wishbone.
Music
- Roméo et Juliette, an 1839 "dramatic symphony" in seven movements (choral and instrumental scenes) by Hector Berlioz.
Theatre
- & Juliet is a Jukebox Musical showing an alternate telling of the story where Juliet decides not to take her life and her journey moving on from Romeo.
- Romeo and Juliet, a 1935 ballet with music by Sergei Prokofiev.
- Romeo and Juliet, a 2021 British production by the National Theatre, filmed entirely in a closed theatre, featuring a modern retelling of the play while keeping the original text.
- Romeo & Harriet, a musical parody of Romeo and Juliet.
- Roméo et Juliette, an 1867 opera by Charles Gounod.
- Romeo et Juliette: De La Haine a l'Amour , a French musical by Gerard Presgurvic, which has played in more or less similar format in Canada, Mexico, Japan, and various countries throughout Europe and in a much Darker and Edgier Hungarian adaptation.
- West Side Story, probably the most famous adaptation out there, telling the story of a romance between two teens from rival gangs in the 1950s. Adapted into film in 1961 and 2021.
- Maplestory adapts the story for a party quest, though the characters live in a town of feuding alchemists (one more focused on nature, the other on technology) and somehow Frankenstein's monster is also involved.
- The Sims 2 features the "Veronaville" neighborhood, with the Montys and the Capps as major players, complete with a feud and teenagers from both families in love.
- Roméo and Julieta, a very, very loose adaptation of the work starring two sentient llama piñatas. Yes, really.
- "The Perfect Pear", a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode that explores the question, what if Romeo and Juliet had lived to have kids?
Unsorted/Multiple
- Often done as a Show Within a Show when a film production or School Play is needed (because it's a play that most people, even those who have never read Shakespeare, are familiar with). If at least one of the two leads is a major character, expect Ship Tease. This includes an episode of Hey Arnold!, an episode of Pokémon: The Series, two episodes of K-On!, the second OVA to Cardcaptor Sakura, and an ongoing arc in the first part of Season 12 of Degrassi. An episode of Sabrina: The Animated Series is about auditioning for the play (and features a conjured-up version of Romeo to give Sabrina some coaching).
- Romeo and Juliet: A DreamZone Parody: The porn version.
- Jules and Monty, a 2014 webseries that translates the story to a modern college setting.
- The radio drama featuring AKB48, known as "Watashitachi no Monogatari", did their own version of Romeo and Juliet, with the two aces of SKE48, Matsui Rena and Matsui Jurina, as the main pair. Not only do they change the characters names (basing them more on their respective members names), but they also give it a much happier end. As to be expected, this broadcast pleased lots of WMatsui fans.
- In 2018, AKB48 member Kato Rena produced an original adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with TWO casts of members across the 48 group that were chosen via audition as part of her personal "Renacchi General Elections". In this adaptation, the two families actually like each other and it's Romeo and Juliet themselves who are feuding at the beginning of the play. This adaptation implements more comedic moments as well as introducing new characters, but still contains much of the drama and tragedy.
- Mônica e Cebolinha: No Mundo de Romeu e JulietaRough Translation: A live-action adaptation of the play with costumed actors portraying Monica and Jimmy Five as the titular lovers. Like most kid-friendly adaptations, the play ends with both lovers alive and together and both families ending the rivalry for good. Was adapted into theatre in 1978, Direct-to-Video and TV in 1979, and again made a stage play in 2013 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Monica's Gang comic series.
