What better time to announce a gender-swapped remake of Lord of the Flies than in the wake of “Look What You Made Me Doâ€? According to Deadline, Scott McGehee and David Siegel will write and direct a new adaptation of William Golding’s classic novel. McGehee tells Deadline that the source material is “aggressively suspenseful, and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression.â€
How will a critique of violent patriarchy go when you just sub in a commentary on toxic matriarchy, which isn’t actually a thing that exists as a threatening issue in the real world? We’ll see! Movies like Heathers and Drop Dead Gorgeous and Jawbreaker have of course already given us fun versions of a female Lord of the Flies, and it’s hard to imagine cheeky villains like Courtney, Heather Chandler, and Becky Ann Leeman fitting into something so dire as Golding’s narrative. We’re already bummed.