Netflix has forgotten that Roald Dahl is British

By taking full control of the RDSC, Netflix promised to “bring some of the world’s most loved stories to current and future fans in creative new ways”.

It is fair to say that, five years on, those grand plans have not come to fruition. Little by way of new Dahl adaptations has made its way to Netflix, and most of what has would surely have left the author biffsquiggled at how his iconic creations could be turned into such rommytot.

The latest offering is Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, a bafflingly titled and toe-curlingly bad reality TV series set in a cheap-looking Chocolate Factory in which American contestants compete for a $3m cash prize in a series of generic game-show challenges.

Aside from the name and setting, the biggest link to Dahl’s most famous story is the use of the late Gene Wilder’s voice (resurrected using artificial intelligence and the blessing of the actor’s family, apparently) and the fact that one of the Oompa Loompas, Rusty Goffe, first played one of Willy Wonka’s workers in the 1971 film.

The reviews have been as unkind as Veruca Salt. My colleague Benji Wilson gave it one star and said that Dahl would have hated it; the Guardian’s critic called it “bleak” and enough to make a viewer nauseous; Variety said the show would “keep Dahl’s work in the zeitgeist – if not exactly for the right reasons”.

Then there is last year’s animated adaptation of The Twits, featuring the voices of Johnny Vegas and Margo Martindale as the eponymous couple, which was widely panned for jettisoning Dahl’s style, tone and plot and replacing them with toilet humour. Even worse, like Wonka’s The Golden Ticket it had been massively Americanised.

It has not all been bad. Wes Anderson directed a series of short films based on Dahl stories, and won an Oscar for best live action short film with The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

The new version of Matilda, starring Emma Thompson as the all-time great villain Miss Trunchbull, was a critical hit when it was released in 2022 – but because it was made by Sony Pictures it has been absent from Netflix for almost two years (despite being billed as a Netflix original outside the UK).

Meanwhile, Waititi’s project has been beset by years of delays and, instead of the planned series, is now set to be an animated film released in the autumn of 2027 featuring the voices of Helena Bonham Carter and Kate Winslet.

Charlie vs the Chocolate Factory will be a sequel of sorts to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which Wonka (voiced by Waititi) has been released from prison for the crime of having turned a child into a blueberry and is besieged at his factory by a new generation of “rotten” kids trying to steal a priceless chocolate bar. Confusingly the “Charlie” of the title is not Charlie Bucket but Charlie Paley, voiced by Heartstopper actor Kit Connor.

Quality aside, the little Dahl work that has been produced by Netflix so far is hardly boundary-pushing, according to Matthew Dennison, author of Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl.

“If you look at the nature of the content they’ve generated, with the exception of Henry Sugar, it’s fairly well trodden stuff, isn’t it?

“More Matilda, more Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Twits is not really embarking on a radical new line, is it?”

Netflix’s logic for buying the Dahl estate seemed pretty sound.

Intellectual property (IP) is what obsesses entertainment bosses, with ready-made characters and franchises seen as a low-risk way of drawing in audiences.

Dahl, who died aged 74 in 1990, is one of the most successful authors of all time: his books have sold more than 300 million copies and been translated into 69 languages. His children’s characters have entertained youngsters for generations, while his relatively lesser-known adult works – such as his Tales of the Unexpected – are examples of masterful storytelling. It appeared to be a reasonably safe bet.

Despite that, Netflix and Dahl are not the most obvious bedfellows, according to Dennison.

“Dahl himself had a number of experiences of working in and with cinema, almost all of which he hated. He had this very personal campaign in favour of reading, against television, and so the selling of the estate to a platform that is going to produce material not for reading, possibly there’s a sort of irony there.”

The big bet has not yet paid off.

A leading agent who works on some of the biggest literary estates says that he is “surprised” that Netflix has not done more with its expensive Dahl property over the past five years.

Partly, such delays may be the result of a certain kind of timidity.

Anything new will inevitably be compared with what went before it, and woe betide anybody whose productions are deemed to be either not up to the required standard or a radical departure from the source materials.

“You take a high risk,” says the agent. “You take a risk from your fans and take a risk from the commercial market.”

That has already proven to be true with Dahl: the outcry after The Telegraph revealed that many of his children’s books had been rewritten to remove “offensive” words and phrases was fierce and led to Puffin, the publisher, to re-release the original texts.

Things are further complicated by the fact that, in his lifetime, Dahl sold the rights to certain stories and characters to different buyers – meaning there is something of a hodge-podge of entities that can claim ownership of his work.

Confectionery producer Ferrero, for instance, owns the right to sell Wonka-branded chocolate bars and worked with Netflix on relaunching some of its products to coincide with the new reality show.

Netflix bosses will surely not love the fact that the most successful on-screen Dahl adaptation since it took over the estate is Wonka, the 2023 Timothée Chalamet musical prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that was made by Warner Bros (the studio behind both the Wilder film and the 2005 Johnny Depp-led remake).

Thanks to what one insider describes as “a complicated rights environment”, Warner Bros can make more Wonka films alongside Netflix’s offerings.

Owning and integrating an estate as sprawling as Dahl’s is a wholly new experience for Netflix, which does not have Dahl’s family members to help shepherd the estate following the sale.

For all intents and purposes, the RDSC is no longer a separate entity. Instead, it is ultimately controlled from California, which may go some way to explaining why productions like The Twits and Wonka’s The Golden Ticket seem so gratingly American.

The latter was filmed in Brisbane with producers largely hailing from Australia and the US. The forthcoming Charlie versus the Chocolate Factory is set in London but neither the writers nor directors are Brits.

The DNA of Dahl, that quintessentially British humour, appears to be a casualty of the Netflix deal.

“He is a very British writer,” says Dennison.

“There’s a kind of fundamental Britishness to all of it.”

I ask him what he makes of the fact that these Netflix offerings seem so far removed from Dahl’s British roots.

“It does strike me as odd,” he says.

“At that point you think, well, what are they buying? Have they bought the plots? Have they essentially bought the structure of those stories without engaging with the way that Dahl communicates those stories?”

He points out that, while Dahl’s first wife was American (the actor Patricia Neal), he was “disdainful of American popular culture, in particular television” – something perhaps best encapsulated in the character of Mike Teavee.

The RDSC had been a reliable cash cow for years: throwing off millions in profit that was taken as dividends by relatives including his granddaughter, the model Sophie Dahl, and her half-brother Luke Kelly, who ran the company before the Netflix acquisition. (The family benefited from the huge windfall in 2021.)

This is despite Dahl becoming an increasingly controversial figure in recent years. His virulent anti-Semitism was notorious – he said of Jewish people in a 1983 New Statesman interview that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” – and was the basis for Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier-winning play, Giant, starring John Lithgow as the author.

“I imagine that many people, if they think about Dahl now and the fact that perhaps Netflix isn’t producing as much as they anticipated, might assume that that was to do with Dahl’s current controversial status,” says Dennison.

“But when you look into the actual projects that seem to be taking a long time to come to fruition, that’s not the case, is it?”

Netflix sources insist that the relative paucity of new Dahl content is a deliberate strategy.

“The reason this has taken as long as it’s taken is because we took a thoughtful approach,” says one.

“We bought this much-loved, iconic IP and we want to handle it with care, we want to grow it and develop it.”

The streaming giant has been busy in an understated way.

It is a shame for Netflix that its highest-profile Dahl productions since buying the estate were duds in the form of The Twits and Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.

A lot now depends on Charlie versus the Chocolate Factory to prove that the £500m ($1.17 billion) acquisition was not an expensive mistake.

The quality of the output must surely get better.

As the literary agent says: “Dahl’s work is perennial and will find its way.”