After being forced to sit tirelessly through them, both at home and in class, classic novels might not be your thing. What about their movie adaptations?
It’s an undeniable fact that movies are the popular choice when it comes to assigned reading. Maybe you personally haven’t done it, but we all know at least one person who has decided that they can’t be bothered, or simply don’t have the time to sit down and read a 300+ page book. Not when life is moving so incredibly fast. The Picture of Dorian Gray probably isn’t an exception to this rule…except now you get to watch a woman rocking on the big (depending on how large your tv is) screen.
As told exclusively to Variety, Lionsgate has made plans to turn the book into a movie with a female lead. The movie will also be directed by a female director, Annie Clark, who you might know from her music career as St. Vincent. She has directed a couple of other things such as XX, a movie that also deals with horror, but this might be the one that leads into something bigger.
If you need a little recap of what the book is about, don’t worry, we’ve got you. The only full novel published by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray is about a person who has sold their soul for eternal youth as well as the constant physical state of always being beautiful. Now that they have sold their soul, every bad thing that they could ever do will now be visible on a portrait of them, but never seen on the real deal. Basically, they’re all set to be immortal. We then follow them through the suicide of an ex-lover, the murder of an ex-friend and the blackmail of another. Really nice stuff like that.
Oscar Wilde, the author, was born in 1854 and is of Irish descent. A writer of plays such as ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, he has not written any other novels apart from The Picture of Dorian Gray. He was also been sentenced to two years in prison, due to homosexuality. Oh, there’s also the fact that he’s been quoted 4,299 times on Goodreads although that probably wasn’t something that you needed to know to truly enjoy the movie. But hey, the man’s quotable.
