Canal Plus, Fox Networks Group Europe & Africa, and AGC Television’s War of the Worlds series released its first inside look at the upcoming drama set to star Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern, which will be set in modern-day European.
The series will also feature an ensemble cast including: Léa Drucker, Natasha Little, Daisy Edgar Jones, Stéphane Caillard, Adel Bencherif, and Guillaume Gouix. Gilles Coulier who is known for The Natives, will direct four episodes of the series alongside, Richard Clark Versailles fame.
First serialized in 1897 by Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan in the US, H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds made its hardcover starring all the way back in 1898 through London publisher William Heinemann. Wells wrote the novel between 1895 and 1897, and is collectively considered one of first stories to depict a conflict between mankind and extraterrestrials.
The original work is structured as a first-person narrative with both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother in London as co-protagonist, as they navigate southern England after a sudden alien invasion. Despite being the second adaptation currently in the works — the other being the BBC’s interpretation, which will be set in Edwardian England— the eight part drama reportedly will closely follow the original story albeit with a modern twist.
“In literature, dystopian novels and science fiction has been a safe place for us to deal with collective terror,” Byrne commented on the upcoming show. “But what Wells also understood is that the greatest threat is not from out there, but from inside ourselves, and we see in this new telling of the story a warning that it is only our own humanity that will save us.”
Canal Plus, Fox Networks Group Europe & Africa, and AGC Television’s adaptation, will helm from Channel 4’s Misfits creator, Howard Overman, in partnership with Studiocanal’s Urban Myth Films, alongside Fox Networks Group Europe & Africa and AGC Television.
While Canal Plus and Fox have Europe and Africa distribution rights, AGC will showcase the show in North America in co-distributing deal with Studiocanal throughtout Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Fox will process the sells in its European offices.