Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Netflix has also revealed that the streaming service is planning on making it into a series.
It’s unknown whether this will be a continuous series or a short limited series that only tells the story told in the novel.
Since Netflix just recently acquired the rights, a premiere date has not been set. The streaming service revealed that they will produce the series, so casting, writing the screen adaptation, and filming still need to be completed.
Once the series starts filming, a premiere date could be shared by Netflix. Since production has yet to begin, a premiere date probably won’t happen this year or in early 2020.
Interestingly, his family hasn’t been open to adapting his novel into a movie or television show before. This marks the first time they’ve allowed anyone to adapt it to the screen for a brand new audience since the publication of the novel in 1967.
Netflix has acquired the rights, but the streaming service isn’t the first to contact the family to acquire the rights. In this case, Marquez’s sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García will work with the streaming giant to produce the series. Both will work as executive producers.
Gabriel expressed concern that the book wouldn’t fit into a full-length movie. Netflix was also a good fit for the family, as they will tell the story in Spanish with foreign subtitles. Netflix is also dedicated to hiring the best Latin American actors to tell the story the best way possible to honor the late writer.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away in Mexico in April 2014 at the age of 87. He died after battling pneumonia following hospitalization for infection and dehydration. He had previously been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer but beat it. After being declared healthy, he was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2006.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967 by the Colombian author and the book tells the story of the Buendia family and the patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía.
He founded the town of Macondo, which is a fictitious town in his native country of Colombia. The book is a multigenerational novel, called inventive, amusing, sad, alive, and magnetic with unforgettable characters.
The people in the book are said to be beaming with compassion and personalities that connect with the soul of the reader and it has been called a masterpiece.
The book, originally written in Spanish, has been translated into 46 languages and it has sold more than 50 million copies since its release. Marquez was honored with The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his various novels and short stories.