Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong?

New York Times

11-03-2025

I'm thinking of a piece of filmed entertainment. It was adapted from a famous, internationally significant novel. It was blessed with lavish budgets, accomplished directors, ambitious visual design. A premiere was announced, ads were purchased, trailers were released — and then, one day, it was dumped onto a streaming service and almost immediately forgotten.
Can you guess which one I'm thinking of? It could be 'Pachinko,' or 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' or 'The Wheel of Time,' or any number of others. This past December, Netflix released over eight hours of television adapting somewhat less than half of Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 classic, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' It has, in fact, been Hoovering up the rights to major novels from around the world, spending millions to transform them into prestige programming. In the last year alone, there has been a film adaptation of Juan Rulfo's novel 'Pedro Paramo' (from Mexico), a mini-series of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's 1950s novel 'The Leopard' (from Italy) and the first season of a version of Liu Cixin's 'The Three-Body Problem' (from China), which reportedly cost around $160 million to make.
News that this was happening to 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' might have shocked Márquez. He wrote for the movies and gave his blessing to multiple adaptations of his work, but the great Colombian writer never did sell the rights to 'Solitude.' He thought its story, which follows the Buendia family over a century of history in the fictional city Macondo, would take 100 hours to tell properly; he also insisted it be filmed in Spanish. After his death in 2014, his widow held to these wishes; it was only in 2019, after the couple's sons had become more involved in the estate, that Netflix acquired the rights. Márquez's heirs would be executive producers. They negotiated for the show to be made in Colombia, and in Spanish.
When the series was announced, though, Netflix sounded a more global note: 'We know our members around the world love watching Spanish-language films and series,' said its vice president for Spanish-language programming. Netflix is available in more than 190 countries, and once a piece of original content enters its library — whether a Korean drama or a Latin American telenovela — it can be viewed most anywhere. The company seems to have pursued 'Solitude' as an iteration of hits like 'The Crown,' 'Squid Game' and 'Money Heist': local productions that captivate international audiences through a combination of regional specificity and broad televisual legibility.
The book is a natural candidate. It offers an imaginative evocation of Colombian history, rife with characters and love affairs and civil wars; it is also one of the best-known Spanish-language novels in the world, having sold some 50 million copies across nearly four dozen translations. Like 'The Leopard' and 'Pedro Paramo,' it has both national pedigree and international reputation, its title familiar enough to make viewers around the world pause over the Netflix tile. It is, in other words, valuable I.P. And that means it must now conform to the expectations of modern streaming: It must be adapted for frictionless international content consumption.
Netflix's 'Solitude' begins where the novel ends — in Macondo's future, with the Buendia family's house overgrown with trees. Then it flashes backward, stopping along the way to touch on the book's opening line: 'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'
In the novel, this line leads into a series of digressions — about wandering peddlers, and then the family patriarch's zeal for new technology, and then his futile search for the coast, which leads to the discovery of a Spanish galleon mysteriously marooned deep in the interior — and only then, after most of a chapter, do we reach Aureliano's encounter with the ice; it's a masterful opening, instructing the reader on how to approach the novel's wealth of diversions. In the show, that famous line is simply narrated atop an image of a middle-aged Aureliano staring stonily at the camera, before the show leaps back in time to tell its largely linear story. Márquez's words resound, literally, throughout, serving as narration for the more prosaic images on the screen.
You sense an insecurity on the show's part. It is handsome, with sets designed by cinema veterans and carefully distressed period clothing. But the images it offers are either superficial depictions of events Márquez did not need to detail, or else they are rendered superfluous by Márquez's text being read atop them. The show's persistent literalism meshes oddly with the magic of the material. In the third episode, a girl called Rebeca arrives at the Buendia household carrying the bones of her parents in a canvas sack. Márquez wrote that the sack 'followed them everywhere with its dull rattle' — blending metaphor and reality, leaving ambiguous whether the bones moved on their own or nagged at the Buendias' minds. Netflix's 'Solitude' opts to depict this literally, rolling a canvas bag around in the background like a Mos Eisley cantina droid. Other moments deploy the stock language of fantasy and horror to illuminate premonitions and nightmares, reducing the novel's poetry to special effects.
It seems the aim, in Netflix's world, is to put the text onscreen in a way that is maximally legible, with none of the experimentation that might allow an adaptation to become an autonomous work of art. The same feels true of its 'Pedro Paramo.' This is what it takes for an expensive adaptation of a best seller by a Nobel Prize winner to wind up laid out for you on a tile alongside choices like 'Hot Frosty' or 'A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter.' You can even disregard Márquez's wish about language: The platform's spotty dubbing lets you watch in English, French, German, Hungarian or Japanese, among others. Where once an adaptation of a major novel might have arrived with some fanfare, the process here seems rote and mechanical, simply dropping the work into a stream of interchangeable content based on other old things, from video games to tabloid crimes. As Netflix's founder, Reed Hastings, has said, the company's main competition is sleep; the point is to fill the platform's library with an endless quantity of easily consumable content.
Márquez may have anticipated even this. In 'Solitude,' Rebeca's arrival brings with it a plague of insomnia that infects the entire town. At first, people are overjoyed to lose 'the useless habit of sleeping.' Yet, without access to sleep or dreams, they begin to forget words and memories and basic truths about the world. They mark every object in town, from tables to cows to banana trees, with increasingly detailed signs explaining their names, uses and meanings.
Hollywood has spent a good century remaking important literature, and I am hardly the first to argue that 'the book was better.' But these adaptations suggest something more expansive at work. Thanks to the scale of Netflix's viewership and its surveillance trove of subscriber data, the company is starting to centralize the world's moving images under a single umbrella; it is creating a platform where everything has to stream together well, playing to everyone everywhere. Márquez's book achieved such global success because its sensibility was specific. On TV, it is one of many shows that seem to have been reverse-engineered from the needs of its parent company; it resembles the other things on Netflix more than it resembles anything in Márquez. Its story is dissolved into a world of content which exists, entirely, as its own description — a sign on a tile representing something else altogether.