Three award-winning writers died on 22 November 1963, perhaps the most notable such coincidence since Cervantes and Shakespeare both died (or at least had their death recorded) on 23 April 1616. The fact that one of the trio was John F Kennedy, who had won a Pulitzer prize for Profiles in Courage, served to obscure the death of Aldous Huxley in California and CS Lewis in Oxford, and their obituaries were tardy. Fifty years on, a slew of books and TV programmes have inevitably been produced to mark the half-centenary of the presidential assassination, but this time one of the British authors has not been entirely eclipsed.

Lewis, author of children's and science fiction novels, religious works and literary criticism, will be honoured with a plaque in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey on Friday. His novel The Screwtape Letters is next week's Book of the Week on Radio 4, read by Simon Russell Beale, and on 27 November his love life (dramatised in the film Shadowlands) is the subject of a BBC4 documentary, CS Lewis: Secret Lives and Loves.

Like his friend JRR Tolkien, the medievalist don owes his posthumous flourishing largely to the suitability of his sagas for cinema adaptation in an age when Hollywood primarily targets young audiences and has CGI at its disposal. Attacks from Philip Pullman, who has slated the Narnia books not only as "reactionary" and Christian "propaganda", but as "blatantly racist", "monumentally disparaging of girls and women" and containing "not a trace of Christian love" – seem to have had minimal impact on either Tinseltown types or parents.

Last month plans were announced for a movie version of The Silver Chair, the fourth of The Chronicles of Narnia to be adapted. The three previous films, bound to be hard to avoid on television over the Christmas period, have grossed £100m worldwide.

In contrast, although Huxley actually worked in Hollywood (Anita Loos spotted him reading a text in Persian in his MGM office), little of his prolific, diverse output has been filmed. As a result, revival and rediscovery à la Lewis have never taken place: Ken Russell's early-70s nudeathon The Devils, based on his pioneering non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun, remains the most prominent big-screen Huxley adaptation, as Brave New World has been adapted for television and radio but not cinema.

While it's this dystopian novel, a critique of the legacies of Sigmund Freud and Henry Ford, that ensures Huxley keeps his place on GCSE syllabuses as one of their canonised "English Literary Heritage" authors, its reputation has declined, while the prestige and influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four have continued to rise.

Arguably, Huxley ought to have benefited posthumously, like Lewis, from a revolution that took place around 25 years ago – a political revolution, in his case, not a technological one. In a letter in 1949 addressed to "Mr Orwell" – although he had taught him at Eton – Huxley praised Nineteen Eighty-Four as "profoundly important", but argued against its forecast of a future where "the boot on the face" of state sadism would "go on indefinitely": he believed "the world's rulers" would use the soft power of psychological conditioning to coax "people into loving their servitude", rather than "flogging and kicking them into obedience".

If for the following 40 years Orwell might have seemed to have the better of the argument, the unravelling of communist totalitarianism in Europe after 1989 left a world closer to the Huxley version. Yet "Huxleyan" has never become a dictionary-ratified word, and Brave New World still awaits its literary champion as well as a film director fired up to adapt it. Huxley could soon be remembered, if at all, only for The Doors of Perception, the book that supplied the Doors with their name.