Ava DuVernay’s Array Filmworks has partnered up with Amazon Studios and Macro Television Studios to bring Octavia Butler’s classic 1987 science-fiction novel, Dawn, to TV.
What We Know:
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Octavia Butler was an African-American science fiction author, in 1995 she became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. This is the first time that the Science Fiction Hall of Famer’s work has ever been adapted.
- Victoria Mahoney, who co-directed the Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, will adapt Butler’s work to television and create the pilot but DuVernay’s Array production company will produce the work.
- Mahoney has also directed episodes for many TV shows, including Power, American Crime, and Grey’s Anatomy. In addition to the TV shows, her feature film debut, Yelling At The Sky came out in 2011.
- Macro Studios originally optioned rights to Dawn back in 2017. But, now that Amazon has signed on, the project is expected to develop in a much quicker process.
- The award-winning book, Dawn, which was published back in 1987, is about a Black woman who teams up with aliens to resurrect the human race 250 years after they were destroyed in a nuclear war.
- In addition to this, DuVernay is currently working on a documentary on Nipsey Hussle, who was killed on March 31, 2019, in front of his South L.A. Marathon Clothing store, for Netflix. The Nipsey film marks DuVernay’s official return to documentaries since putting out 13th, which was about mass incarceration and racism throughout the criminal justice system.
- DuVernay also was behind Netflix’s very own When They See Us, a limited Netflix series that recaptures the stories of the five Black teenagers dubbed the Central Park Five, who was wrongly arrested and convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park. The series received 11 Golden Globes nominations and won a 2020 Critics Choice Award for Best Limited Series.
No cast or release date has been set for Dawn.
