Danny Boyle & Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach’ To Become A TV Series On Fox

Danny Boyle has been the center of attention over the last week thanks to his fantastic Opening Ceremony at the London Olympic Games. By the time the Olympics are over we’ll be back to talking about his film projects (and in particular “Trance”), but for the moment we’ll settle for a piece of news about a new interpretation of one of Boyle’s former projects. “The Beach” was Boyle’s Hollywood debut, and his adaptation of Alex Garland’s 1996 novel was arguably his most compromised feature – Boyle famously fell out with his prior collaborator Ewan McGregror after overlooking him to cast Leonardo DiCaprio – but it didn’t deter him from working with Garland again, twice.

Fox have now bought the rights to a new version of “The Beach,” which is based on both Garland’s novel and Boyle’s film. Andrew Miller (“The Secret Circle”) was apparently a fan of both the book and the movie (really?) and has penned the new television version of the story, which will be developed with 20th Century Fox TV. Fox were also the distributors of the 2000 movie, and the current Fox Entertainment chairman was an exec producer on Boyle’s film – he probably remembers the healthy profit the movie generated rather than the critical mauling it received.

“It’s about a group of young people feeling disconnected and disenchanted from society who try to start over in paradise but discover that while creating the perfect world is hard, protecting it is even harder,” said Miller of the project. And frankly, as little affection as we have for Boyle’s movie version, we can see why this could be an attractive TV project. The disenchanted youth is a great angle to kick off from, and then sending a bunch of (presumably beautiful and perfectly sculpted) young people over to a tropical island paradise to work out their teen angst sounds like the easiest of easy sells. We’ll be very surprised if we aren’t looking at this on primetime television in just over a year’s time. [Deadline]