It's time for a new Gulliver's Travels

Tom Bidwell is in the adaptation business. The British screenwriter’s previous credits include Netflix’s Watership Down and The Irregulars (based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures), Apple TV+’s The Velveteen Rabbit, and the BBC’s The Primrose Railway Children, an adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson’s novel which is itself a retelling of E. Nesbit’s 1905 book. Basically, Bidwell is the guy you call when you want a new take on an old classic, and this time he’s tackling Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels.

The new six-part series, entitled The Gullivers, “is in development with a major European broadcaster,” according to Variety. Bidwell’s modern version of the tale is reportedly told “through the eyes of Gulliver’s 21st century wife and children as they embark together on a lifesaving mission.” In a statement, the writer said, “Few works of fiction have impacted storytelling and culture like Swift’s masterpiece. It is a work of extraordinary imagination that I have wanted to adapt for many years but was, if I’m being candid, always a little afraid to do so. The team at Moonriver and Federation have a breadth of experience adapting novels of this ambition and scale and when they approached me with the idea of a modern adaptation about Lemuel’s family I was thrilled to help them bring it to screen.”

Of course, we’ve already had a “modern” Gulliver in the new millennium. Jack Black starred in a big-screen adaptation in 2010. In typical 2010s fashion, Black’s version of Gulliver was a loser and a liar who ultimately redeemed himself in the eyes of his crush by becoming an adventurous hero. (He ended up in the fictional land of Lilliput after getting shipwrecked in the Bermuda Triangle.) The film co-starred Jason Segel, Billy Connolly, Chris O’Dowd, and Emily Blunt, who had to turn down the role of Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to her contractual obligation to Gulliver’s. “We do not talk about that film,” Blunt said in an interview last year when her Fall Guy co-star Ryan Gosling brought it up. She kindly asked fans that they “please don’t” rewatch the film, which was a critical and commercial failure in the U.S. Hopefully, Bidwell’s TV adaptation will fare better.