Netflix really wants to be in the Andy Serkis business.
Last week the streaming giant purchased the actor/director’s Rudyard Kipling adaptation Mowgli from Warner Brothers to debut sometime next year. And now they have bought the rights to another classic of British literature, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for Serkis to direct. Unsurprisingly, the film will be realized through performance capture.
The project will see Serkis reuniting with his Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and War For The Planet Of The Apes director Matt Reeves, who will serve as a producer on the project.
For those who somehow escaped having to read the seminal middle school required reading novel, Animal Farm centers on a group of farm animals who stage a revolt and win their freedom from the human farm owners. They form a utopian society which seems idyllic and just at first, but things take a turn when ambitious pig Napoleon slowly stages a coup for control of the farm.
Animal Farm is a project that Serkis has been wanting to tackle for some time. In 2012 his production company The Imaginarium had optioned the rights to the novel from Orwell’s estate.
