"A Wrinkle in Time" Falls Flat on Oprah's Face

The Disney movie version of one of my favorite childhood books "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L' Engle debuted this weekend. It was given the Disney treatment (not the Walt Disney, but the post Uncle Walt version). Then Oprah got hold of it. When they were done, all the Bible verses and Christian themes were stripped out of it so that it's barely recognizable as the original book. They had to wait 10 years after L' Engle's death to butcher her masterpiece, but they managed to do it.

It made less than half what they hoped over the weekend. And after the critics gave it less than enthusiastic reviews and word got around the Christian community about the heart being cut out of it, they'll be lucky to break even on it.

Disney's AWIT gets a raspberry for cutting the
beating heart out of L'Engle's book.

The screenwriter argues that Madeleine L'Engle wanted to express all the ideas in the film but couldn't do it in the book way back in those ancient and unenlightened days, so she chose to use Christian themes. She assures us that this is how the author would have done it if she'd been more progressively enlightened and less dependent on religion.

L'Engle could not be reached for comment. Disney and Oprah waited till she was safely dead and could no longer object to the brutalization of her lovely little Newberry Award winning book.

© 2018 by Tom King