The Best John Grisham Adaptations — Where Will the New ‘Rainmaker’ Rank?

Nearly two decades after Tom Cruise lit up the big screen in the film The Firm — more on that below — NBC gave the story the small-screen treatment. Interestingly, the one-season TV show doesn’t just retell the original story but supplements it, picking up 10 years later, with Mitch McDeere (now played by Josh Lucas) emerging from hiding only to fall into another conspiracy. The result was a decent legal drama… that perhaps could have benefited from more of Grisham’s input.

Surprise, surprise — this TV series is based on non-fiction Grisham wrote. In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, two murders lead to the imprisonment of four men under questionable circumstances. Even with a captivating true-crime story and Grisham’s bestselling examination, the Netflix documentary is vividly told but feels too surface-level, not a cross-section of the power structures at play.

This thriller focuses not on the litigation or even the case itself but on the jury members, as a consultant played by a smarmy Gene Hackman tries to engineer a favorable jury but gets blindsided by two jurors who have their peers in their pocket. Runaway Jury is not a fine movie, sure, but it spins a yarn as craftily as the courtroom players do.

Here, Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington play a law student and a reporter cracking the case of the assassination of two Supreme Court justices. Any movie pairing those two A-listers is all right by us, but The Pelican Brief is less taut and more talky than other Grisham adaptations. (That said, the action, when it happens, is certainly explosive!)

Though it’s another example of white-savior storytelling, A Time to Kill is still an absorbing tale of a legal team defending a Black man who enacted revenge on white assaulters of his young daughter. Matthew McConaughey gets top billing for the first time, and Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson join him on the marquee, while Octavia Spencer makes her film debut in a bit part.

Though it often gets overshadowed by more star-studded (and higher-grossing) Grisham adaptations, the film version of The Rainmaker had director Francis Ford Coppola helming an effective underdog story starring Matt Damon and Danny DeVito as a lawyer and paralegal who go from ambulance-chasing to taking on a callous insurance industry.

All it took was six minutes of screen time to earn Holly Hunter an Academy Award nomination in this blockbuster film. She and Tom Cruise play employees of a law firm in too deep with the Chicago mob. The film’s payroll is rife with fine actors playing the good guys, bad guys, and everyone in between.

This white-knuckle legal thriller starts with a terrifying incident: A young boy witnesses the suicide of a mob lawyer and becomes a mob target himself. So begins a courtroom showdown between Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon, the latter of whom earned a Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar nomination for her part in our favorite take on a Grisham story.