Resumen

Auto da Compadecida is a play written by Ariano Suassuna in 1955, which tells the adventures of João Grilo and Chicó, with elements of social, political and religious criticism. It was first performed in Recife in 1956 and is considered one of the most popular texts of modern Brazilian theater. It was filmed in 2000 and became the highest grossing Brazilian film of that year, with 2 million viewers, and is considered by many to be the best Brazilian comedy of all time. At the end of 2024, a sequel to the story was released, making it the second highest grossing Brazilian film after the Pandemic, with over 4 million viewers. The friendship and adventures of the characters have inhabited the collective imagination of Brazilians for more than two decades, and the memes and cut scenes, always present on the networks, recover and renew the story. Considering this set of media and the extrapolation of the original play by so many means and with the participation of fans and spectators, and using the evaluative indicators of transmedia skills, we analysed the historical path of the literary work Auto da Compadecida, from the novel to the successes of the cinema screens. In this way, the aim of this work was to show that the novel is a transmedia narrative and that the participatory culture of the audience, one of the pillars that defines a transmedia storytelling, means that this story remains in the collective imagination, supporting this heritage of Brazilian culture.