Netflix is certainly trying to conquer the Latin American market, what with greenlighting 50 movies and series produced in Mexico over the next two years to their airing of several original series set in South America. Now, it looks like the streaming giant is set to adapt one of the landmark titles by one of the world’s foremost authors in the Spanish language.
The streaming platform announced today plans to adapt Gabriel García Márquez‘s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) as a series. Published in 1967, the epic follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they travel to the city of Macondo to make something of themselves. There’s a healthy dose of love, violence, and magical realism thrown in the book that’s over 400 pages. The series is being developed by Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha and will film exclusively in Colombia and in Spanish. When asked about the project Rodrigo García said there was hesitancy to adapt the book over the years, but “in the current golden age of series…the time could not be better.”
Last year Netflix’s main competitor, Hulu, announced their own plans to adapt Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits into a show, so it’s hard not to see this as some fun competition between the two companies. The last major attempt to adapt Márquez’s work was in 2007 with the theatrical release of Love in the Time of Cholera which received mixed to negative reviews despite the author’s positivity around it. That film also drew criticism for being directed and written by white Americans, which this series should rectify. Now’s a great time to pull out the dusty copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and revisit the beauty of Márquez’s work!