linguistic:translation, structural:expansion
Film and TV performances

An early film version of Hamlet is Sarah Bernhardt 's five-minute film of the fencing scene, which was produced in 1900. The film was an early attempt at combining sound and film; music and words were recorded on phonograph records, to be played along with the film. Silent versions were released in 1907, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1917, and 1920. In the 1921 film Hamlet, Danish actress Asta Nielsen played the role of Hamlet as a woman who spends her life disguised as a man.

Laurence Olivier 's 1948 moody black-and-white Hamlet won Best Picture and Best Actor Academy Awards and is as of 2024, the only Shakespeare film to have done so. His interpretation stressed the Oedipal overtones of the play and cast 28-year-old Eileen Herlie as Hamlet's mother opposite himself at 41 as Hamlet.

In 1953, actor Jack Manning performed the play in 15-minute segments over two weeks in the short-lived late night DuMont series Monodrama Theater. New York Times TV critic Jack Gould praised Manning's performance as Hamlet.

The 1964 Soviet film Hamlet (Russian: Гамлет) is based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Innokenty Smoktunovsky was cast in the role of Hamlet.

John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in a Broadway production at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1964–65, the longest-running Hamlet in the U.S. to date. A live film of the production was produced using "Electronovision", a method of recording a live performance with multiple video cameras and converting the image to film. Eileen Herlie repeated her role from Olivier's film version as the Queen, and the voice of Gielgud was heard as the ghost. The Gielgud/Burton production was also recorded complete and released on LP by Columbia Masterworks.

The first Hamlet in color was a 1969 film directed by Tony Richardson with Nicol Williamson as Hamlet and Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia.

In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as "sensual rather than cerebral", cast Mel Gibson —then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies—in the title role of his 1990 version; Glenn Close —then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction —played Gertrude, and Paul Scofield played Hamlet's father.

Kenneth Branagh adapted, directed, and starred in a 1996 film version of Hamlet that contained material from the First Folio and the Second Quarto. Branagh's Hamlet runs for just over four hours. Branagh set the film with late 19th-century costuming and furnishings, a production in many ways reminiscent of a Russian novel of the time, and Blenheim Palace, built in the early 18th century, became Elsinore Castle in the external scenes. The film is structured as an epic and makes frequent use of flashbacks to highlight elements not made explicit in the play: Hamlet's sexual relationship with Kate Winslet 's Ophelia, for example, or his childhood affection for Yorick (played by Ken Dodd). This version was also the first unabridged theatrical film adaptation of the play, and runs four hours long.

In 2000, Michael Almereyda 's Hamlet set the story in contemporary Manhattan, with Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet as a film student. Claudius (played by Kyle MacLachlan) became the CEO of "Denmark Corporation", having taken over the company by killing his brother.

The 2014 Bollywood film Haider is an adaptation set in modern Kashmir.

The Northman, released on 22 April 2022 and directed by the American director Robert Eggers who also co-wrote the script with Icelandic author Sjón, is based in the original Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet.