According to Deadline, Netflix has picked up the rights George Orwell’s Animal Farm, with Andy Serkis set to direct a motion-capture based adaptation co-produced by his War For The Planet Of The Apes director Matt Reeves. Serkis has been trying to make an adaptation of Animal Farm for years, and he originally intended to play a role in the film, but now it looks like he’s just going to sit back and tell other people in mo-cap suits what to do instead.
The original novella was published in 1945, and it’s about a farm of mistreated animals that stage a revolution after determining that humans are their enemies. The animals create a utopian society where everyone is treated equally, but a pig named Napoleon gradually takes over and gradually reduces a series of seven commandments to one rule: “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” It’s a very fantastical story that obviously could never happen in real life, except—prepare to have your mind blown—it did happen in real life because it’s all a metaphor for Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical reign in the Soviet Union.
That allegory is a little outdated now, but Serkis could easily modernize it by changing Napoleon the pig into more of a Donald Trump figure. Oh sure, making a greedy capitalist asshole like Donald Trump into a pig wouldn’t be particularly subtle, but the original book wasn’t particularly subtle either.