With Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria, attached as well.
As reported by and A Monster Calls is working with Luca Guadagnino to produce a new adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The 1954 novel, which is technically sci-fi and maybe a little bit of fantasy, too, depending on your interpretation, features the survivors of a plane crash on a deserted jungle island. The survivors, all British boys, build a microcosm of civilisation and then the book details that civilisation’s gory, brutal collapse. It’s nasty, cynical stuff, a treatise on the inhumanity of man featuring dead pigs, some Christ metaphors, and a lot of middle schoolers trying to murder each other.
According to THR, this adaptation, being developed by Warner Bros., will stick pretty close to the original version of the story, so don’t expect any big changes or innovations here to the pretty familiar concept. Ness and Guadagnino are both well decorated in their fields, with Call Me By Your Name being a massive hit and Ness having won the Carnegie Medal for his writing of Monsters of Men and Monster Calls. His tenure in film has been more mixed. He wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of Monster Calls, which was relatively well received. But the adaptation of Chaos Walking was less… favourable. The film, starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, was reportedly “unreleasable” in its original state and has undergone extensive reshoots, now slated for release in 2021.
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No word yet on when this version of Lord of the Flies might be hitting production or release, but here’s hoping it has better luck than Chaos Walking. Or the kids in Lord of the Flies.