This paper examines two recent film adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and discusses these two films as offering new understanding of adapted films as essentially self-reflexive media. Hamlet is one of canonical Western literary works that has most vigorously been re-interpreted and re-produced all over the world. Among the countless versions of this classical drama, this paper especially pays attention to the most recent and high-profile adaptations, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000, US) and Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet (2006, China). While most screen versions of Hamlet try their best to preserve the "essence" of the classical work in their themes, plots, characterization, and dialogues, these two films are quite unique in their daring attempts to take wild liberties in recreating the Shakespearean drama. Almereyda's Hamlet is thrown into twenty-first century New York City, and is a filmmaker. In the Chinese version, the story is set in ancient China in which Hamlet is a martial arts expert and Gertrude's lover. Applying Barbara Hodgdon's concept of the "expectational text" as an important critical framework to analyze these films, this paper explores the meaning of these two films' defying of such audiences' expectations toward the original work. In the process, it is argued that borrowing Shakespeare's cultural authority and creating complex intertextual webs of cultural signs, these two films open spaces in which to comment more on the current status of the American and Chinese film industries than the Shakespearean past.