In the final stage of the ride, guests enter one of two glass elevators, where they join Willy Wonka as they travel around the factory, eventually shooting up and out through the glass roof. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is frequently ranked among the most popular works in children's literature. Before they brought Roald Dahl's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory back to the big screen he worked with Johnny Depp on Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow and the soon to be released animated tale Corpse Bride.

On 27 November 2018, Netflix was revealed to be developing an "animated series event" based on Roald Dahl's books, which will include a television series based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the novel's sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. In May 2021, it was reported that the film would be a musical titled Wonka, with Timothée Chalamet playing a younger version of the titular character in an origin story.

At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory—inspiring Dahl's idea for the recipe-thieving spies (such as Wonka's rival Slugworth) depicted in the book. A 2004 study found that it was a common read-aloud book for fourth-graders in schools in San Diego County, California. As Charlie seems to enjoy the tour, the other four children succumb to temptation, and end up being caught in the factory workings and have to be safely recovered by the Oompa-Loompas, albeit in worse shape than at the start of the tour: Augustus falls into a river of chocolate and has been sucked up by a pipe before being rescued from the fudge processing center; Violet expands into an oversized blueberry when she tries an experimental piece of chewing gum despite Wonka's warnings; Veruca is thrown away as a "bad nut" by trained squirrels; and Mike is shrunk down after being the first person transported by Wonka's new television advertising invention.Time magazine in the US included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time; it was one of three Dahl novels on the list, more than any other author.