Though HG Wells wrote The Island Of Dr. Moreau back in the 1890s, it might be best known to most people via the troubled 1996 film that infamously saw director Richard Stanley sacked and replaced with John Frankenheimer. Hoping for a slightly smoother path to the screen is a production company Gunpowder & Sky, which has writer Zack Stentz at work on a TV adaptation.
Wells' story of a driven scientist creating human/animal hybrids as part of his experiments will be updated for today's world in Moreau, which focuses on world-renowned scientist Dr. Jessica Moreau, whose pioneering work in genetic engineering catches the eye of a billionaire backer willing to stop at nothing to reach the next step of human evolution.
"The double helix wasn’t even a twinkle in Watson & Crick’s eye when HG Wells first wrote The Island Of Dr. Moreau, but his 1896 novel proved astonishingly prescient about how unlocking the secrets of DNA would open the door to humanity playing God with the natural world in strange and frightening ways," says Stentz. "And now, in the shadow of the CRISPR revolution, it felt like the perfect time to revisit Moreau and bring it into our own 21st Century world of transgenic animals, designer babies and other scientific advances Wells never could have dreamed of."
The next step will be to find a home for the show, so the producers will be pitching it to various channels and streaming services. Leave the chimeras at home (or off the Zoom call) perhaps...