Victor Hugo’s novels are part of a cultural history that begins in the second half of the XIXth Century with the development of new media such as illustrated edition and popular press. The book is no longer the one and only way of spreading the text. Image and, at the beginning of the XXth Century, film, belong to that cultural process too, maybe because Victor Hugo’s work was essentially based on visual and spectacular effects. The extraordinary success of the movies based on the adaptation of the writer’s novels can be analysed following two principles, seriality and repetition of identical patterns, which are essential to understand the meaning of the films in their relationships with the novels.