It seems they came back for more fish! Hitchhikers will be ecstatic to learn that Hulu is adapting and updating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as television series. The show will join many iterations of the iconic story, written by Douglas Adams, that has since become a staple of British pop culture. What started as a sketch radio program has since been adapted into novels, stage plays, tv series, a film, and video games, to name a few. The novels have been adapted into more than thirty languages. The most recent addition to the Galaxy canon was the novel And Another Thing… which was released in 2009.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was most recently adapted for the screen in 2005. In the movie, Martin Freeman played Arthur Dent, the protagonist and a mere human. Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Stephen Fry, John Malkovich, Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, and Sam Rockwell also starred in the movie. The plot is basically the same in every version of the production. The story follows that Arthur Dent is saved from annihilation when his home, that is the planet Earth, is pegged for total destruction to make room for an intergalactic highway. He is saved by his best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who happens to be writing the titular travel guide.
The proposed Hulu television series is a collaborative work between executive producer and showrunner Carlton Cuse and feature writer Jason Fuchs. Cuse’s credits include Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Lost, and The Strain while Fuchs worked on Wonder Woman, Pan, and Ice Age: Continental Drift.
The 2005 movie was produced by Touchstone Pictures, whose parent company is Disney, and the current television series is set to be an ABC production, which is another leg of Disney. Additionally, the series is set to be available on Hulu, a streaming company Disney recently acquired a majority stake in.
One can currently stream the 2005 movie on Netflix.