When we first heard Netflix were turning Willy Wonka into a reality show, I thought it was kind of an ingenious idea – the film (and the book, natch) is basically structured as an eliminatory reality gameshow anyway so really, why not? Of course in the story the golden ticket winners eliminated themselves through their own various acts of greed and stupidity, we don’t actually have any clue here what winning and losing entails, whether this will be a parable or whether they’ve reduced it to who can squeeze the most giant human blueberries or whatever.
Although recreating Gene Wilder’s voice using AI is… hmm.
Anyway the set looks good, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket launches on Netflix September 23rd.
And speaking of people doing challenges in a fantastical setting, Fort Boyard is back on France 2 on Saturday! Cyril Feraud, massive Fort Boyard nerd, is the new host somehow finding time amongst all the other France Televisions things he hosts, and it looks like they’ve thrown everything at it this year – this year’s theme is lots more team games and “Highlights” where you earn bonus money throughout the show. Hopefully they’ll be going up on Youtube, but if you’ve got a VPN the first few episodes are going out at 7:50pm (UK) / 8:50pm (France). We’ll be discussing on the Discord, as ever.
In Boyard-adjacent – and ‘making use of the medium in another form’, which kinda sorta ties it with the Wonka adaptation too – the ‘can we turn this into a crime mystery drama?’ vogue has reached the Fort, as has the age of the Twitch/YouTube streamer – good to see Banijay/FranceTV getting their money’s worth, I guess…
https://www.c21media.net/news/fort-boyard-franchise-expanded-with-crime-drama-youtube-episode/