As passionate discourse continues over whether or not Netflix will spell doom for cinema, the streaming company fires back with a new huge get – a Spanish-language adaptation of beloved Columbian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Telling the story of seven generations of one family leading the fictional town of Macondo, it’s a novel considered exemplary of the magical realism subgenre and a masterpiece in general.
Over a half century after its original publication, this will be the first filmed adaptation of the novel despite many years of offers – the decision by the family to sell the rights is partly attributed to the success of Narcos and Roma and Netflix's willingness to do the show in Spanish. While the novelist’s children Rodrigo and Gonzalo will serve as executive producers on the project, it’s also hard not to be anxious about a work of such significance becoming another slightly-too-long, darkly lit Prestige Television series with a minute and a half long intro full of VFX shots of objects with vague relevance to the show.
On the other hand, this could be incredible. It's still unknown who will write and direct this, but those must be some intimidating shoes to fill. Let's all keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best on this one.