‘Lord of the Flies’ is to be remade with an all-female cast.
Warner Bros. Pictures are adapting the "timeless" William Golding novel about a group of British boys who become stranded on a desert island and are forced to fend for themselves and organise their own mini-society, but directing duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel have decided to replace the key characters with girls to explore how their behaviour would adapt in the same scenario.
Siegel said: "We want to do a very faithful but contemporised adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys. It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behaviour they saw in grownups before they were marooned."
The storyline sees the well-educated children descend into savagery with Golding’s three central characters – Ralph, Piggy and Jack – turning on each other, and McGhee hinted that their movie will confront the stigma that boys are more likely to be aggressive than girls.
McGehee added to Deadline: "It shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression."
A release date and cast are also yet to be announced, but the adaptation has come under fire from critics who say a female director should be assigned and Warner Bros has ignored the central themes of the novel.
American writer and commentator Roxane Gay wrote on Twitter: "An all women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because … the plot of that book wouldn’t happen with all women."
It’s not the first time the 1954 novel has been reworked for the big screen as director Peter Brook adapted it 1963 and Harry Hook in 1990.
Lord of the Flies to be remade with all-female cast
