Lord of the Flies, the classic William Golding novel about a group of boys marooned on an island and forced to form their own society, is being made into a film (yet again). But this time, instead of an all-boys cast, the students stranded on the island will all be female.
There are two Lord of the Flies film versions out there already: the original 1963 film by Peter Brook and the 1990 Harry Hook iteration, the former of which is critically lauded. The ’90s version, starring a young Balthazar Getty, was more of a pop-culture hit, but it still maintained the original harrowing nature of the story.
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Two male directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel (What Maisie Knew, The Deep End), are helming the project.
“We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys,” Siegel said to Deadline. “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.”
McGehee says it’ll provide an interesting take on boys and girls and aggression, or at least society’s concepts of gender, and the pair is chomping at the bit to get started.
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It seems like the social media world isn’t as jazzed for the project. Some people are aggravated that it’s an all-female cast, while many women derided the idea because it’s not an original story. Of course, the idea that two men are directing the film also didn’t sit well with the prospective audience, and many postulated that Lord of the Flies wouldn’t even unfold the way it does if it were women stranded on the island instead of men.
As Time points out, Golding himself once gave a quote about male-female equality that seems to indicate he wouldn’t necessarily agree with this adaptation of his novel.
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There are no production or release dates planned as of this writing, and Warner Bros. will be the studio backing the movie.