Most English-language versions of The Three Musketeers treat it as a swashbuckling romp first and a historical novel second, understandably, since that's the tone most adaptations, from the 1993 Disney version to Paul W. S. Anderson's steampunk 2011 take, have leaned into. Martin Bourboulon's two-part 2023 French production, Les Trois Mousquetaires: D'Artagnan and Les Trois Mousquetaires: Milady, makes a different choice, and it's worth looking at exactly where that choice pays off and where the films still have to compress a very long book.
What the Films Keep
The broad shape survives intact: d'Artagnan's arrival in Paris, the triple duel that becomes a friendship instead of three separate fights, the mission to England for the queen's diamond studs, and Milady's long, patient campaign of manipulation and revenge. Eva Green's Milady in particular leans into the character's real intelligence rather than playing her as a simple femme fatale, closer to how the novel writes her, as someone consistently smarter than the men trying to outmaneuver her, than how several English-language film versions have flattened the role.
The films also restore some of the novel's political seriousness. Dumas's Richelieu, as covered on this site's own Historical Figures page, is a formidable, even respected antagonist in the actual text. It's mostly the movies that turned him into a cartoon villain over the decades. The 2023 version pulls back toward the book's more ambivalent treatment, giving Richelieu's political reasoning real weight rather than reducing him to an obstacle for the heroes to outwit.
What Gets Cut, and Why That's Inevitable
Sixty-seven chapters of a serialized 1844 novel simply cannot fit into two films without real compression, and the cuts here are mostly the expected ones: subplots involving minor nobility, some of Porthos's comic set-pieces, and a fair amount of the novel's wry narratorial commentary, which doesn't have an obvious cinematic equivalent. What's interesting is less what got cut than what got kept in its place: the films spend real time on the siege of La Rochelle, a true historical event that many adaptations treat as a footnote, giving the story's second half a weight closer to the book's own balance between personal adventure and national politics.
A Rare Case of Real Invention Alongside Real Fidelity
It's worth being direct about where the 2023 films actually depart from Dumas rather than simply compress him. The production introduces two entirely new characters with no basis in the novel at all: Mathilde d'Herblay, established as Aramis's sister, and Hannibal, a musketeer based on France's real first documented Black musketeer. Neither exists in the 1844 text. This is a deliberate choice by the screenwriters to diversify and expand the ensemble beyond what Dumas's novel provides, and it reflects a broader pattern in several recent prestige historical adaptations: introducing new characters grounded in real historical possibility rather than either inventing purely fictional additions or restaging the original cast unchanged.
The films also reimagine Porthos as bisexual, another addition with no textual basis. The novel's own Porthos is defined mainly by his relationship with a wealthy older female patroness he depends on financially, with no explored same-sex relationships in Dumas's text. These changes sit somewhat uneasily alongside the production's otherwise careful historical fidelity elsewhere, and it's worth readers knowing the difference between where the films are being faithful to Dumas and where they're consciously updating him for a contemporary audience.
Constance's Kidnapping Restructures the Plot
The second film leans heavily on Constance Bonacieux's kidnapping as the mechanism driving D'Artagnan's alliance with Milady, a plot device that compresses and reorders several of the novel's separate threads (the diamond studs mission, Milady's manipulation of Felton, Constance's fate) into a tighter, more unified thriller structure than the book's own, more loosely connected chapter-by-chapter unfolding. It's an efficient choice for a two-film structure, even if it changes the novel's own pacing logic considerably.
A French Production, Finally
There's something notable about the story returning to French hands after decades of primarily English-language, English-accented versions. The 2023 films don't play the material as a costume romp for an outside audience; they play it as their own national epic, which changes the texture even when the plot beats are identical. It's the same shift in perspective you get reading the original novel itself rather than a version filtered through a different country's assumptions about what French history is supposed to feel like. See our piece on translation for more on how much that kind of filtering shapes the English reading experience too.
If you've seen the films and want the source material, The Three Musketeers is here in full, or start with the d'Artagnan Romances reading order to plan out the whole trilogy.