A great book can tell a great story, but that doesn’t mean the story will reflect well on screen. This goes double for epic stories with sprawling scopes — words on a page are far cheaper than months on a set. For example, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is incredibly popular, but an attempt at a film adaptation completely fell flat. While Mike Flanagan is taking another crack at that story over at Amazon Prime Video, Netflix is going even bigger with an adaptation of one of the most influential books ever — and now we know when we can expect it.
All the way back in 2019, Netflix announced an adaptation of Gabriel García Marquéz’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story follows a couple as they establish the fictional utopia of Macondo and the seven generations of the family after them. With such a large time range, this had to be given a large-scale adaptation, and thankfully the Netflix series will last for 16 episodes. Check out the teaser for the series below.
A more recent announcement reveals the release strategy for this high-profile series: the first part of the 16 episodes will premiere on December 11, with a second part premiering at a later date, presumedly next year.
Gabriel García Marquéz was hesitant about giving up the rights to adapt his masterpiece, as he thought there was no way to cover the Colombian origin and the sheer length in a Hollywood movie. “Sometimes he would say we could do it in a hundred hours, and in Spanish in Colombia,” García Marquéz’s son Rodrigo told Bloomberg. This series may only be a fraction of those hundred hours, but it is a Spanish-language production that was shot entirely in Colombia, so it’s doing the author justice.
Calling this story influential would be an understatement. One Hundred Years of Solitude’s vast scale and magical realist tone became a guidepost for countless other stories across genres, from For All Mankind to 3 Body Problem, to Encanto. Now, TV viewers can finally see this foundational story come to life, hopefully in a way that recaptures the magic and epic scope.
One Hundred Years of Solitude may have been previously viewed as one of those unadaptable novels, but Netflix is taking every precaution available to make sure it brings the novel to life: a large-scale production in the country of the novel’s origin, a runtime twice the length of Netflix’s usual eight-episode seasons. This could be more than just an attempt to adapt an unadaptable book: it may just be Netflix’s next hit.
