Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, to create the first screen adaptation of the 1967 masterpiece.
The streaming company announced on Wednesday that the book will be adapted into a Spanish-language series and filmed largely in the author’s home country of Colombia. Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, will serve as executive producers.
Acquiring rights to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn't easy. García said that his father was sceptical of the novel fitting within a traditional film structure, and wanted the story to be told in Spanish.
“For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to One Hundred Years of Solitude because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice,” García said.
“But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides. We are excited to support Netflix and the filmmakers in this venture, and eager to see the final product," he added.
“We are incredibly honoured to be entrusted with the first filmed adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a timeless and iconic story from Latin America that we are thrilled to share with the world,” said Francisco Ramos, Vice President, Spanish Language Originals for Netflix. “We know our members around the world love watching Spanish-language films and series and we feel this will be a perfect match of project and our platform.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the Buendía dynasty, founders of the rural and isolated town of Macondo, and fuses fantastical and allegorical elements such as rains of yellow flowers, alchemy and religious apparitions, with realism and history. It became a defining work of magical realism and one of the most celebrated Latin American novels of the 20th century, having sold an estimated 47 million copies and been translated into 46 languages.
Netflix's Narcos, which is also based on the concept of magic realism in parts, was a successful venture.
Another seminal work by Márquez, Love In The Time of Cholera, was adapted into a film by Mike Newell in 2007, starring Javier Bardem and Benjamin Bratt. His Chronicle of a Death Foretold was adapted for both film and Broadway.
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