The Internet Is Not Impressed With the All-Girl ‘Lord of the Flies’ Remake

Lord of the Flies is a story that most of us read in school. A group of boys get deserted on a tropical island, choose a leader, accidentally set fire to the dead jungle, miss their chance to get rescued, bully each other, battle and commit murder.

The book earned its author, William Golding, a Nobel Prize and has since been adapted to theater and stage. But now two male directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, have a deal with Warner Bros to write and direct a new version with one important twist: it will be a female-centric remake.

McGehee told Deadline that the subject matter “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.”

But the internet is not happy. Here are some reactions…

Some questioned the lack of original stories about girls:

Others said that the remake contradicts the whole point of the novel:

Golding himself famously said: “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been,” when asked about equality in his work. Adding that he wrote about males because he was a male, and that boys “are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.”

And others commented on how the film probably wouldn’t be as much of a thriller: