Netflix Wins Again
100 Years of Solitude comes to the small screen
Proving its undefeatable prowess in the realm of entertainment, Netflix has once again scored another major feat in the game of series gets. This month the network announced that it had acquired the rights to Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s timeless classic “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It is the first time the bestseller will be adapted for the screen. First published in 1967, the Nobel Prize-winning novel has withstood the test of time in book form only, a long-held wish of the author; a fact that is quite ironic, as Márquez was a screenwriter himself.
The novel weaves a magical narrative of the fictional Buendía family in the fictional town of Maconda. It spans seven generations over the course of 100 years, hence the title. Marquez knew that telling this story in a two-hour film format wouldn’t do his work justice. And he turned down multiple offers for film adaptation over the years. But that does not mean the author didn’t see the potential in being adapted for television. “To sell a million copies of a book is something exceptional, but in one night you can reach 10 million spectators, and that’s the idea: to reach that public with ideas and quality, the same quality that is brought to literature,” he said in 1989.
While Márquez died in 2014, the decision to adapt the book fell to his family. In a statement to The New York Times, his son Rodrigo Garcia said, I’ve been hearing the discussion about whether or not to sell the rights to ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ since I was 8. It was not an uncomplicated decision to make, for myself and my brother and my mom. It feels like a great chapter opened, but also a long chapter has closed.”
His two sons will now take the helm with the unfolding of this new chapter, as they will both serve as executive producers of the series. The pressure is not lost on either. “For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to ‘Cien Años de Soledad’ 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,” Rodrigo Garcia said in a statement.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold an estimated 50 million copies in print and was translated into almost 50 languages. With Netflix, the series will potentially reach 140 million subscribers across 190 countries. Perhaps telling to this new venture with Netflix, the author spoke of storytelling in general several years before his death. ”I’m a storyteller. It doesn’t matter to me whether the stories are written, shown on a screen, over television or passed from mouth to mouth. The important thing is that they be told.”