We're Getting an All-Female Lord of the Flies Movie Written by Men — What Could Go Wrong?

In "We Never Asked For This, but Hollywood Is Giving It to Us Anyway" news, another Lord of the Flies movie is on the way, but unlike William Golding's classic 1954 novel and the 1963 and 1990 film adaptations, this version is replacing the young male castaways with girls. Oh, and Deadline reports that it will be written and directed by two men, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, for Warner Bros.

*pause for exasperated sigh*

While the move to replace a large cast of male characters with female ones is gender progressive, in a way, the story — a plane carrying a group of British schoolboys is shot down during wartime and they're left stranded on a remote island, where they eventually devolve into a toxic society — basically negates all hope that this movie will be empowering for women in any way. Do we really need to watch a bunch of young girls destroy each other as they regress into female stereotypes within their vicious, self-contained community? Even Golding himself pointed out that his novel's story could only work with men, noting that "women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been."

While all-female versions of movies like Ghostbusters and the upcoming Ocean's Eight make sense, redoing Lord of the Flies in this way (which will essentially be the opposite of Wonder Woman's Themyscira) seems like a pretty obvious misstep. We've already seen similar situations play out in movies like Mean Girls, Heathers, and Jawbreaker, but the fun, campy elements of those films will presumably be absent from McGehee and Siegel's screenplay. Fortunately for everyone irritated by the news, Twitter did not hold back in sharing all the reasons the concept is a huge bummer.