‘Island’: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way To Produce TV Adaptation Of Aldous Huxley’s Final Novel
Acclaimed writerAldous Huxleyis best known for his 1932 novelBrave New World, which you probably had to read in high school. (A new TV adaptation of that book is currently airing on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming service.) But whileBrave New Worldexplored a dystopian world, Huxley’s final novel, the 1962 bookIsland, served as a counterpoint, diving into the idea of a utopian society instead. NowLeonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company is set to make anIslandTV series. Get the details below.
Varietyhas the news about the upcomingIslandTV show, and they describe it like this:
That sounds a little bit likeThe Beach, Alex Garland’s book which Danny Boyle adapted into a 2000 movie that starred – yep – Leonardo DiCaprio. Now the actor will executive produce thisIslandadaptation alongside his producing partnerJennifer Davisson. Also executive producing will beRoee Sharon(300: Rise of an Empire) and Leonardo’s father,George DiCaprio, a former performance artist who has since produced several documentaries about everything from global warming to Polish-American artist Stanislav Szukalski.
I’ve never readIsland, but Wikipedia points out that Huxley used the book as an opportunity to flip the script onBrave New World, using similar plot points but contextualizing them in totally different ways. (Example:Brave New Worldfeatured characters getting into a trance-like state for indoctrination purposes, whileIslanduses the trance-like state for super learning.) The idea of a white guy rolling into a utopian society and inadvertently screwing everything up for its inhabitants is a common trope in literature, television, and film, but I wonder how audiences will react to that idea in 2021-ish, in the wake of Hollywood’s reckoning with systemic racism throughout multiple levels of the industry. I don’t expect that trope to just disappear, especially given how entrenched it is in literature and how often books serve as fodder for adaptations, but it’ll be interesting to track the frequency of stories like these in the years to come.
