The Best Three Musketeers Movie, Compared (1993, 1973, 2011, 2023)

Four screen versions dominate every argument about this book, and they disagree about what kind of story it is more than adaptations usually do. One is a buddy comedy, one is a mud-and-bruises farce, one has airships, and one is a straight-faced French epic. They are all recognisably the same plot. Only one of them is the same book, which is also roughly the split you feel playing the playable Three Musketeers against reading it.

🏆 The one people keep coming back to

Stephen Herek’s Disney version, released in November 1993, took $111 million on a $30 million budget and holds a 33% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Both halves of that are the point: the reviews were cool and the audience was not, and three decades later it is still the one people name first when the subject comes up.

• ✅Chris O’Donnell plays D’Artagnan, Kiefer Sutherland Athos, Oliver Platt Porthos and Charlie Sheen Aramis — casting confirmed by ScreenCrush’s cast retrospective.
• ✅Tim Curry plays Cardinal Richelieu and Michael WincottRochefort. Curry’s performance is the single most-quoted thing about the production and has almost nothing to do with the cardinal Dumas wrote.
• ✅Rebecca De Mornay plays Milady, in a version that keeps her menace and drops most of her history, so whether the cut counts as a loss depends on which argument about her you find persuasive.

What it gets right is the company. The four of them are funny together, the friendship is the engine rather than the decoration, and the film is secure enough about its own tone not to apologise for it. What it loses is everything the novel is grim about: the branding, the poisoning, the riverbank. It is Dumas with the temperature turned down about forty degrees, and for a first watch that is a defensible trade.

🎞️ The 1970s pair, and the clause it created

Richard Lester shot the whole novel as one production and the producers cut it into two releases, the second arriving the following year as The Four Musketeers. Oliver Reed plays Athos, Frank Finlay Porthos, Richard Chamberlain Aramis and Michael York D’Artagnan, across both halves.

The cast found out the way audiences did. They had been paid for one production and had made two, they sued, and the industry’s response outlived the picture: Screen Actors Guild contracts still carry a “Salkind clause” specifying how many pictures a performer is being engaged for. An adaptation of a book about a contract dispute over a two-year commission generated a real one.

As a reading of Dumas it is the funniest of the four and the dirtiest. Lester plays the swordfighting as slapstick with real consequences: people slip, weapons snag on furniture, and duels are won by whoever is less exhausted. It is closer to the novel’s own sense of humour than anything else on this list, and it is the version to reach for second.

The Siege of the Inn is a doorway in the playable Three Musketeers, and it settles the argument these films keep having: the fight is cramped, badly lit and short of ammunition, and you choose whether to hold the room or talk your way out of it. Role-play The Three Musketeers →

💥 The one with the airships

Paul W. S. Anderson’s 2011 film put Logan Lerman, Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson and Luke Evans in the four lead roles, with Milla Jovovich as Milady, Christoph Waltz as Richelieu, Mads Mikkelsen as Rochefort and Orlando Bloom as Buckingham. It also puts flying warships over Paris, built from stolen Leonardo blueprints, and stages a large part of its third act in the air.

It made money — $132.3 million against a $75 million budget — and critics were unusually united against it, at 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. The interesting failure is not the airships. It is that a plot about four men with no institutional power outmanoeuvring the most powerful man in France does not need a set piece bolted on top of it, and the more the production supplies spectacle the less anyone has to be clever.

🇫🇷 The French pair that reads the book

Martin Bourboulon’s two-part French production is the closest anyone has come to filming what is actually on the page. François Civil plays D’Artagnan, Vincent Cassel Athos, Pio Marmaï Porthos, Romain Duris Aramis, Eva Green Milady and Lyna Khoudri Constance, across a first film that holds 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a second that concludes the story.

It is also the version that takes Milady seriously. Screen Daily’s review of the second half calls it a propulsive adventure that stays with the twistiness of the source rather than smoothing it, and singles out Green. At roughly €36 million a picture it is a large production by French standards and a modest one by the standards of the 2011 version, and it looks better than either.

The trade is tone. Nobody in this pair is having the kind of fun Oliver Platt is having, and if what you want from these characters is four friends enjoying each other’s company, the French films will feel cold. If what you want is the book, with the branding and the convent and the river in it, this is the one.

🎬 How to pick, if you only watch one

Start with Herek if you have never read the novel and want to know why anyone cares about these four people. Start with Bourboulon if you have read it and want to see the parts that usually get cut. Take Lester second in either case, because the jokes have aged better than anything else here. Come to Anderson last, or not at all, unless the airships are the draw for you rather than the objection.

The one thing no version gives you is the thing the novel does best, which is the sense that any of these choices could have gone the other way. Every film has already decided who swears the oath and who crosses the river, and you watch them arrive at it, which is the gap the playable version exists to fill.