Much Ado About Nothing modern-day studios of Wessex Tonight, a fictional regional news programme, as part of the "ShakespeaRe-Told" season, with Damian Lewis, Sarah Parish, and Billie Piper. The first cinematic version in English may have been the 1913 silent film directed by Phillips Smalley. Martin Hellberg's 1964 East German film Viel Lärm um nichts was based on the Shakespeare play. In 1973 a Soviet film adaptation was directed by Samson Samsonov which starred Galina Jovovich and Konstantin Raikin. The first sound version in English released to cinemas was the highly acclaimed 1993 film by Kenneth Branagh. It starred Branagh as Benedick, Branagh's then-wife
Much Ado About Nothing the album is also a quotation from the play. The 2014 YouTube web series Nothing Much to Do is a modern retelling of the play, set in New Zealand. In 2015, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the music for a rock opera adaptation of the play, "These Paper Bullets", which was written by Rolin Jones. In 2017, a YA adaptation was released by author Mckelle George called "Speak Easy, Speak Love", where the events of the play take place in the 1920s, focused around a failing speakeasy. In 2018, author Molly Booth released a summer YA novel adaptation called "Nothing Happened",