Deadline has announced Ava DuVernay’s latest exciting project: The A Wrinkle in Time director is teaming up with producer Charles D. King’s (Fences) Macro Ventures and television writer Victoria Mahoney (Misfits) to bring Octavia Butler’s seminal Afrofuturist sci-fi novel Dawn to the small screen.
The first novel in Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Dawn takes place 250 years after a nuclear war left humanity almost extinct and Earth mostly uninhabitable. Lilith Iyapo, the series’ protagonist, awakens to discover that she is among the humans who have been saved by the alien Oankali. But despite the Oankali’s generosity in rescuing these survivors and curing diseases like cancer, their request in return is unimaginable. And it’s up to Lilith to help convince what’s left of humanity to listen to the deal the Oankali propose…
The television rights to Dawn were optioned in 2015 by producer Allen Bain, but that adaptation fell through.
DuVernay tweeted the news, saying how honored she was to adapt Butler’s novel:
Honored to partner with my friend @VictoriaMahoney + good brother @IAmCharlesDKing to bring legend Octavia Butler’s stellar work to screen! pic.twitter.com/2nXeefjxBE
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 9, 2017
What’s interesting is that today’s announcement focuses only on Dawn, despite there being two other novels in the series now known as Lilith’s Brood: Adulthood Rites and Imago. It will be interesting to see how DuVernay and her team approach the beginning of Lilith’s epic. To that end, there’s also no word yet on if this would be a miniseries or a series spanning several seasons. DuVernay and King will serve as executive producers on the series.
