The pair have created The Secret World of Roald Dahl, a doc podcast series that peels back the secret spy life of the beloved children’s author, revealing “a life far stranger than fiction.”
The first episode is dropping on Monday (January 19). Created and hosted by Aaron Tracy, the story will explore how the author of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘The BFG’, ‘Matilda’ and many other classic children’s books spent a period of his life as a spy for MI6, along with his personal relationships, creative failures and other experiences that shaped him.
The podcast is the sixth to come out of a pact between iHeartPodcasts and Imagine, following Hello Isaac, Unf**ing the Future, Big Sugar, The Tao of Muhammad Ali and Obscurum. Another series will be unveiled shortly, we hear. Nathan Kloke exec produces The Secret World of Roald Dahl alongside Kara Welker for Imagine Audio. iHearPodcasts will distribute, with episodes dropping weekly.
Dahl was born during World War I in 1916 and died eight decades later in 1990, during which time he had become one of the world’s most beloved children’s authors. He was also married to The Day the Earth Stood Still actress Patricia Neal, having five children together before divorcing.
Many of Dahl’s books were adapted as films, with Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp both playing the chocolaltier Will Wonka in Hollywood versions of ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.’ Timothée Chalamet played the character in a 2023 film about the character’s life.
Other books, such as ‘The BFG’, ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and ‘Matilda’ were also adapted for screen. However, it’s his life away from the pen that Tracey will explore.
“Roald Dahl played a huge role in our childhoods, but most people have no idea he lived one of the noisiest lives of his century,” said Tracy. “He was a fighter pilot, a British spy for MI6, a struggling screenwriter, the husband of an Oscar winner, a writer for The New Yorker, and an amateur neuroscientist who saved thousands of lives before he finally found his voice as a children’s author at 45. iHeart and Imagine have been dream collaborators to help reveal these hidden chapters of Dahl’s life and explore the complicated, controversial person behind the stories.”
“We all grew up on Roald Dahl’s books over here, and the opportunity to work with Aaron Tracy in the podcast space to dig into Dahl’s life was just too good to be true,” added Kloke, executive producer for Imagine Audio. “Aaron connects with Dahl across his work, his humanity and his flaws. It is a wonderful piece of work from a very talented documentarian.”
Installation view: “Aiza Ahmed: The Music Room” at Sargent’s Daughters. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
In a year defined by market calibration—especially on the ultra-contemporary front—very few young artists have truly emerged. One of the rare exceptions is 28-year-old Pakistani and New York-based artist Aiza Ahmed, who in 2025 achieved rapid, sustained recognition across two key regions: the art world’s center in New York and the rapidly expanding cultural ecosystem of the Gulf. Her enthusiastically received debut solo at Sargent’s Daughters closed only weeks ago, yet she is already preparing for the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Qatar in February, where she will be one of the youngest artists featured in the fair’s curated exhibition format led by artist Wael Shawky. Although she completed a year-long residency at Silver Art Projects, Ahmed has temporarily traded her downtown Manhattan studio views for the MENA region’s most prestigious residency at the Fire Station in Doha, also directed by Shawky. She spoke with Observer from that studio, where she is working on the major installation she is preparing for her next milestone moment in Doha.
This continual movement between countries and cultures is not new to Ahmed, whose life has been shaped by constant geographical crossings. Her grandparents were originally from Calcutta but left India for Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, beginning a migratory trajectory that has threaded through the family ever since. Born in 1997 in Lahore, she spent a brief period in Karachi before relocating to London with her family at a young age. Ahmed spent her adolescence in Dubai before moving to the U.S. for her undergraduate studies at Cornell, followed by an MFA in painting at RISD. Now a decade into living in the States, she acknowledges that her life—and by extension, her art—has been defined by inhabiting the in-between, switching between cultural contexts governed by different social codes. That instability has sharpened her acute spirit of observation of the humanity around her, from which all her work originates.
Upon entering her solo at Sargent’s Daughters, what stands out is not only the maturity of her visual lexicon but also the clarity of her world-building instinct. Ahmed moves fluidly and inventively across mediums, shaping entire narrative spaces from the moment she traces a face or draws the psychological contour of a figure, then expands that gesture outward into the room as a potentially ever-evolving story.
Aiza Ahmed in her studio. Photo: Leo Ng
“I’ve been drawing and working with my hands for as long as I can remember,” Ahmed tells Observer. Her parents say she was always making things or engaged in some kind of craft. But it was around year seven or eight—early in high school—that her interest began to take real shape. “I had a favorite art teacher who I credit so much—she supported me from the beginning and would leave little notes in my journals, encouraging me. They were just drawings I used to do, but she really saw something in them,” she recalls. “I also recently found these caricatures I made when I was about ten, these political cartoons, and looking at them now, I can see the threads. The seeds were already there—this instinct for humor, for drawing the line.”
Ahmed’s style, in fact, isn’t straightforwardly figurative. Her figures remain suspended in an unfinished state—between dimensions, between figuration and something surreal or even abstract—rooted more in the emotional and psychological space of her characters than in the synthesized volume of their bodies. At the same time, her sharp, confident line work grounds the compositions in a tradition that evokes comics, political satire and caricature. As seen in the work of French satirical artist Honoré Daumier or the German George Grosz, Ahmed’s caricatural style exaggerates posture, expression and behavior with a few quick, incisive strokes, distilling personality or social type into its most telling gestures. She readily acknowledges her connection to this lineage. “I’m really drawn to the face. I feel like I’m a keen observer of people, especially having lived between so many worlds and having to assimilate—from Pakistan to London to Dubai to the U.S.” she reflects. Across all those moves, she adapted in an ongoing process of code-switching—first observing, then imitating, learning to fit in without losing sight of who she was or where she came from.
Drawing gives Ahmed a space for unfiltered, intuitive expression—a way of seeing that precedes the expectations of society or culture. “When I draw, it’s quick and raw,” she explains. “It’s the first mark that comes out. I don’t erase. It’s whatever is coming through me in a stream-of-consciousness way.”
Ahemed’s practice contends with borders, migrations, public histories, and private archives within diasporic identities originating from the Indian Subcontinent. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
Notably, most of the characters Ahmed brings to the stage are men—often exaggerated in their grotesque appearances and postures, whimsically distorted in their grinning or perverse expressions, or revealed in moments of fragile vulnerability beneath a masculine performance of power.
The artist admits she only recently realized that, over time, she has consistently drawn or painted male figures. “I didn’t notice it at first, but recently I was like, okay, in my studio it’s just all these men of different types and me,” she reflects. Earlier in her graduate studies at RISD, she had been thinking a lot about uncles, she adds. “My whole practice is me trying to trace where I come from, the ancestry I didn’t know, the histories and displacement of my own country that I wasn’t taught until really late in my upbringing.” In more recent series, however, something has shifted—or perhaps she has simply become more aware of the deeper reasons behind her recurring male subjects.
Growing up, and even after she left Pakistan, she returned every summer to visit grandparents, aunts and cousins. During those visits, she became attuned to what she calls the grammar of men. “In public spaces, all you see are men. Women are usually inside, or covered,” she recalls, noting how her visual field was filled with authority, corruption and performance. Even after moving to New York, she found the dynamic not so different—only more indirect. “I can’t walk from point A to point B without feeling the male gaze. It’s uncomfortable. It’s charged. At first, I thought it was just Pakistan, but it’s everywhere I go.”
Portraying men, then, becomes a kind of role reversal. “As a young woman, I’m looking at men. In art history, it was usually the opposite: men looking at women, and no one questioned it,” she reflects. Still, she admits she sometimes feels sorry for her subjects. “The way I draw these border guards, they look clunky, short, stout, almost fragile. And then I’m like, wait, why do I feel sorry for them? It’s all very layered,” she acknowledges.
Ahmed enacts, through her art, a sharp human and cultural diagnosis—exposing the hypocrisies and paradoxes embedded in socially coded, gendered behaviors. With her cartoonish figures, she deciphers patterns of authority and performance. Aiza Ahmed observes society as a system shaped by power dynamics—and claims art as a space to imagine different ones.
Ahmed constructs theatrical narratives that unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity, and belonging. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
When asked if she remembers being particularly drawn to political satire in newspapers or to the language of comics more broadly, she says she probably was not looking at anything specific. “I used to read the newspaper because my father would tell me to—just to know what was happening in the world,” she says, recalling how she often found it difficult and would flip straight to the illustrated sections. “It’s funny—I never connected that until now. Maybe that planted something,” she acknowledges, adding that she loved Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and grew up watching a lot of Disney. “The Disney aesthetic really shaped me,” she reflects, describing how she recently discovered a Disney encyclopedia series in an antique shop in Doha. “One volume was called Great Leaders. It listed all these men and maybe two women—like Queen Victoria. It was fascinating, and the illustrations were unlike anything I’d seen,” she says. The find feels serendipitous, almost luminous, given the direction her work is now taking.
The fact that Ahmed constantly oscillates between caustic social indictment and a playfully theatrical or carnivalesque register pushes the grotesque into the realm of the fantastical and hallucinatory. As James Ensor once did, Ahmed’s line exaggerates expression to the point of derangement, using humor, absurdity and the grotesque to surface moral and psychological undercurrents, as well as the paradoxical fragility at the heart of today’s crisis of masculinity and the masculine-led world these performances of power seek to uphold. Applying the inverse of a more gentle, compassionate feminine playfulness, Ahmed’s work unsettles fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity and belonging.
After all, it is playfulness and humor that often allow satire to resonate. They soften the critique just enough for the viewer to enter, while sharpening the underlying point. The best satire lets you laugh and wince at the same time.
This is why Aiza Ahmed’s work often takes on a theatrical presence, as she stages human drama within the space, suspended in dreamlike atmospheres. This was particularly evident in her solo debut with Sargent’s Daughters. Drawing its title, “The Music Room,” from Jalsaghar (The Music Room), Satyajit Ray’s mesmerizing 1958 film, Ahmed translated the movie into spatial terms through a multimedia installation of shifting characters rendered in monumental paintings and wooden cut-out figures. An original composition by historian, composer and guitarist Ria Modak further shaped the mise-en-scène, transforming the gallery into both a soundscape and a theater where these narratives unfolded with unsettling resonance in the present.
Evoking the film’s psychological portrait of India’s zamindar class, propped up under British colonial rule before facing dissolution amid land reforms and shifting politics in the mid-20th century, the music room here similarly becomes a stage for hollow rituals of nostalgia and masculine display. Ahmed’s figures appear as ghostly presences, drawn with raw, essential lines that balance humor and pallor, exposing the paradoxes and slow decay of any myth of masculinity. Crucially, in another act of inversion, she imagines a music room authored by women, turning their gaze back onto patriarchal and colonial power.
A similar impulse shaped her Spring Break Art Show presentation last May, where she first drew wider attention with a booth curated by Indira A. Abiskaroon, a curatorial assistant at the Brooklyn Museum. There, Ahmed reimagined the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, a daily ritual established in 1959 that draws thousands to watch soldiers from India and Pakistan march, gesture and parade as mirrored adversaries in a choreography that has long fascinated her for its oscillation between fury and restraint, rivalry and camaraderie.
Installation view: Aiza Ahmed’s “Border Play” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2025. Photo: Leo Ng
In her installation, she amplified the spectacle to expose its built-in theatricality: bugle calls and Kishore Kumar’s bright vocals led visitors through hot pink drapes and onto a red carpet flanked by wooden soldiers, toward an imagined stage where painted and sculpted figures performed their own exaggerated version of the ritual. Within this draped, cardboard mise-en-scène, the soldiers’ postures, uniforms and expressions became social masks—revealing not only the codes through which authority and masculinity are enacted, but also the fragility those performances attempt to conceal. Her presentation at Art Basel Qatar will continue this narrative; she is currently working on new paintings, a suspended muslin work and a series of wooden cut-out soldiers for the installation.
Ahmed’s visual and narrative approach is not far from the narrative strategies used in commedia dell’arte, which established the idea of fixed “characters” representing social types, each defined by a mask and exaggerated behavioral code—or pantomime, which strips these roles even further, reducing gesture to language and expression to narrative. Ahmed’s suspended storylines operate in a similar register. Much like in Pirandello’s work, she uses playful role-playing and seemingly naive humor to generate immediate empathy while simultaneously revealing the fragile, absurd theater of human existence and the drama of identity.
Thus far, Ahmed acknowledges, two main sources have shaped the origins of her work. One is her personal observation of societal rituals—weddings, funerals and ceremonies that exist in a liminal space between the public and the private, where she has been both observer and participant. The other is the India-Pakistan border, which she has studied in depth. Still, she notes, the overarching theme that continues to emerge is the spectrum of masculinity and the attempt to understand its psyche. What is going on in their heads—and how has that interiority hardened into a social rule that has long shaped a shared sense of reality?
When asked if her work is political, Ahmed says that every action can be a political act. “Even if you don’t voice it, you’re making a statement. Being a brown woman is already a political act. There are endless layers you can add to that,” she argues. And endless, too, are the dimensions in which Ahmed’s powerful imagination can evolve, as she continues to translate her both empathic and critical observations of the world around her.
It is said that one is supposed to get more jaded (read: wiser) with age.That’s obviously not so with director Paul King, best known to most as the writer-director of Paddington and Paddington 2. But to those who really know his style before it became obfuscated by the sugary sweet stylings of those two films, it was Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh that lifted King up the ranks of British pop culture. Indeed, those two works were undeniably his launching point for writing and directing his own full-length feature, Bunny and the Bull, released in 2009, two years after The Mighty Boosh ended (but that didn’t stop Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt from appearing in King’s debut).
By aligning himself with the “quirk” and “offbeat stylings” of these two series, perhaps it became too easy to forget that he didn’t write them. That his own sense of “quirk” and “offbeatness” was entirely different. Entirely more attuned to the, shall we say, saccharine. And while that trait worked quite well for Paddington and Paddington 2, when applied to Wonka, it’s liable to give anyone with working tastebuds a stomach ache. Alas, it appears as though few people have their sense of taste at all anymore, with critics largely praising the movie via such sentiments as “Chocolate Factory prequel is a superbly sweet treat.” Many also seem to think that eradicating all traces of Road Dahl’s signature brand of darkness and cynicism is just dandy. As many also thought the same about censoring his work and then reprinting it for the purposes of adhering to “sensitivity reading.” In fact, in the same review that calls Wonka a “superbly sweet treat,” it is also said, as though it’s a good thing, “Timothée Chalamet leads a beguiling cast in a backstory that rinses away all sourness from Roald Dahl’s embittered chocolatier.” Does anyone care that that’s actually the worst possible interpretation of Willy Wonka, “origin story” or not? And, if Wonka is the so-called origin story it claims to be, where exactly is the part that’s supposed to tell us how he eventually came to be the child-hating (though that’s just good sense) misanthrope that we see him as in Gene Wilder form? Or hell, even in Johnny Depp form (to be sure, it’s been a real surprise to find that Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is more redeemed now than ever as a result of Wonka‘s existence). What’s more, at least Depp’s Wonka had an actual origin story involving his father being an oppressive dentist who would never let him eat any candy, hence his adult enthusiasm for making it.
The absence of darkness (or what darkness there is being presented with a sense of “levity”) in Wonka begs the question: are people so starved for blind hope in the world that they can view the movie as a “much needed” beacon of light rather than taking note of how it not only eliminates the essence of Willy Wonka, but also inflicts a sort of terrified Pavlovian response every time one can feel another song coming on? Especially when it’s from Chalamet. To that point, there’s clearly a reason why the trailer for the movie did its best to conceal the fact that Wonka is a musical. Should viewers have expected that thanks to 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Perhaps. But one of many glaring differences between that version and this “companion piece,” as King calls it, is that the songs in the original film actually slap, while the ones in Wonka are either totally forgettable (save, of course, for the few they repurpose from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) or you wish they would please, god, please just end. This includes Calah Lane, who plays the “orphaned” Noodle, and Chalamet singing the ultra-cheeseball “For a Moment,” featuring such lyrics as, “For a moment/Life doesn’t seem quite so bad/For a moment/I kind of forgot to be sad.” Worse still are Wonka’s attempts at rhyming Noodle’s name with something, as he claims nothing rhymes with “Noodle” (clearly forgetting about “canoodle”), but, in truth, nothing rhymes with Wonka unless you turn “donkey” into “donka.” As in: Wonka sucks donka dick, and is a major insult to Dahl’s original character. One who would never, no matter how young and unjaded, sing, “Noodle, Noodle, apple strudel/Some people don’t and some people do-dle/Snakes, flamingos, bears and poodles/Singing this song will improve your moodle/Noodle-dee-dee, Noodle-dee-dum/We’re having oodles and oodles of fun.” If that doesn’t make one vomit into a bucket, it’s hard to know what will. Apart from King and his co-writer, Simon Farnaby (another The Mighty Boosh alum), incorporating a mama’s boy element into the script.
That’s right, of course Willy is suddenly a mother-obsessed man-boy who only dreams of making chocolate and selling it at the Galeries Gourmet because that’s what he told his mother (Sally Hawkins) he would do. She, in turn, promised she would be right at his side whenever he finally did. Unfortunately, her untimely death makes that all but impossible. That is, if this were a more realistic film. But again, as the critics have praised, Wonka utterly whitewashes and sanitizes everything for the sake of “effortless consumption.” Even the overt intermingling of Black and white characters at a time in history (“fantasy” or not) that wouldn’t have made it look so natural is yet another major signal of the movie’s overall sanitization. This being part of a larger trend in pop culture that might end up doing more harm than good in the long run as audiences are encouraged to pretend that racism never existed, and therefore doesn’t even exist now.
Nor does any trace of Dahl’s wryness. And sure, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory will always have the unbeatable benefit of being adapted for the screen by none other than Dahl himself (though he later disowned the script after it was given an uncredited rewrite by David Seltzer and then altered by director Mel Stuart). Not to mention the dark edge of Wilder portraying Wonka. In Paul King’s version, it isn’t just the unbearably corny nature of everything that makes it insufferable, but also the dreadful miscasting of Chalamet (and Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, for that matter), who makes Wonka read like an impish, dick-gobbling (remember: Wonka sucks donka dick) twink. Really, it looks like he just ate a big mouthful of shit from someone’s arse every time you see him…which doesn’t do much to make the chocolate in the movie seem appetizing.
Beyond that issue, there’s the wielding of the town’s Chief of Police (Keegan-Michael Key) as a source of “comedy” for being fat. A big “no-no” in today’s world, and one of the many details that have actually been extracted from Dahl’s books (that is to say, even mere use of the word “fat”). Nonetheless, the Chief of Police is portrayed as a weak-willed fatso who becomes fat because he’s being paid off in chocolate bribes by the Chocolate Cartel (not exactly high praise or good PR for the candy biz). This group consists of Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Gerald Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton), all clearly based off Boggis, Bunce and Bean, the greedy triumvirate from a different Dahl story, Fantastic Mr. Fox (which Wes Anderson did a far better job of adapting than King has done with Wonka). Another “nod” to a Dahl story is Noodle, so overtly the “Matilda figure” of this narrative. But rather than succeeding as a “heartfelt homage” to Dahl’s work, Wonka is more like a hodgepodge of saccharine candies you didn’t really want, but you guess you’ll gorge on them because they’re there.
If you’re looking for where to watch The Rat Catcher (2023), look no further. Directed by Wes Anderson and based on the short story of the same name by Roald Dahl, this short film follows a rat catcher’s innovative (or rather disturbing) methods to rid the village of rats.
Here’s how you can watch and stream The Rat Catcher (2023) via streaming services such as Netflix.
Is The Rat Catcher (2023) available to watch via streaming?
Yes, The Rat Catcher (2023) is available to watch via streaming on Netflix.
The viewers are introduced to a man named Claude, who wants to free the village of infectious rats, causing him to call a creepy rat-killer. Throughout the film’s run, we see the latter teaching Claude myriad ways to kill rats — be it poisoning oats (which is apparently irresistible to the rats) or demonstrating a rather killing by hypnotizing them. His logic is simple — to kill rats, one needs to be smarter than the rodents.
Watch The Rat Catcher (2023) streaming via Netflix
The Rat Catcher (2023) is available to watch on Netflix. It is a streaming service that lets you watch TV shows, movies, and documentaries on any internet-connected device.
You can watch the short film via Netflix by following these steps:
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The cheapest Netflix Standard with Ads plan provides all but a few of its movies and TV shows, though will show ads before or during most of its content. You can watch in Full HD and watch on 2 supported devices at a time.
Its Standard Plan provides the same but is completely ad-free, while also allowing users to download content on two supported devices with an additional option to add one extra member who doesn’t live in the same household.
The Premium Plan provides the same as above though for four supported devices at a time, with content displaying in Ultra HD. Users get to download content on up to six supported devices at a time and have the option to add up to two extra members who don’t live in the same household. Netflix spatial audio is also supported.
The Rat Catcher (2023) synopsis is as follows:
” In an English village, a reporter and a mechanic listen to a ratcatcher explain his clever plan to outwit his prey.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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Publisher Penguin Random House announced it will release a new collection of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels in their original form after it received criticism for cuts and rewrites removing language that may be offensive to some modern-day readers. What do you think?
“See? You can please everyone.”
Eva Freeman, Candle Scenter
“I’m just disgusted that Roald Dahl has been silent on the matter.”
Andre Ostkamp, Buffet Monitor
“I still wish they kept out the parts aimed at me by name.”
Publisher Penguin Random House announced Friday it will publish “classic” unexpurgated versions of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels after it received criticism for cuts and rewrites that were intended to make the books suitable for modern readers.
Along with the new editions, the company said 17 of Dahl’s books would be published in their original form later this year as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection so “readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
The move comes after criticism of scores of changes made to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other much-loved classics for recent editions published under the company’s Puffin children’s label, in which passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered.
Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — originally published in 1964 — became “enormous” rather than “enormously fat.” In Witches, an “old hag” became an “old crow,” and a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be a “top scientist or running a business” instead of a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”
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FILE – Books by Roald Dahl are displayed at the Barney’s store on East 60th Street in New York on Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Critics are accusing the publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colorful language from stories such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda” to make them more acceptable to modern readers.
Andrew Burton / The Associated Press
In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the word “black” was removed from a description of the “murderous, brutal-looking” tractors.
The Roald Dahl Story Company, which controls the rights to the books, said it had worked with Puffin to review and revise the texts because it wanted to ensure that “Dahl’s wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today.”
While tweaking old books for modern sensibilities is not a new phenomenon in publishing, the scale of the edits drew strong criticism from free-speech groups such as writers’ organization PEN America, and from authors including Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie, who lived under threat of death from Iran’s Islamic regime for years because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel The Satanic Verses, called the revisions “absurd censorship.”
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Rushdie, who was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state, tweeted news of Penguin’s change of heart on Friday with the words “Penguin Books back down after Roald Dahl backlash!”
PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel wrote on Twitter: “I applaud Penguin for hearing out critics, taking the time to rethink this, and coming to the right place.”
Camilla, Britain’s queen consort, appeared to offer her view at a literary reception on Thursday. She urged writers to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.”
Dahl’s books, with their mischievous children, strange beasts and often beastly adults, have sold more than 300 million copies and continue to be read by children around the world. Their multiple stage and screen adaptations include Matilda the Musical and two Willy Wonka films based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with a third in the works.
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka on set of the 1971 film ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,’ based on the novel by Roald Dahl.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
But Dahl, who died in 1990, is also a controversial figure because of antisemitic comments made throughout his life. His family apologized in 2020.
Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Random House Children’s, said the publisher had “listened to the debate over the past week which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation.”
“Roald Dahl’s fantastic books are often the first stories young children will read independently, and taking care for the imaginations and fast-developing minds of young readers is both a privilege and a responsibility,” she said.
“We also recognize the importance of keeping Dahl’s classic texts in print,” Dow said. “By making both Puffin and Penguin versions available, we are offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvelous stories.”
Conservatives criticized from within their own ranks over political ad featuring ‘Willy Wonka’ spoof of Trudeau
NEW YORK — “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” kept the box-office crown for the fourth straight weekend, and the comic holiday thriller “Violent Night” debuted with $13.3 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. But the biggest talking point on the weekend was a movie conspicuously absent from theaters.
Had Netflix kept Rian Johnson’s whodunit sequel “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in theaters, it would have been one of the weekend’s top draws. Last weekend, the streamer — in its first such pact with North America’s top chains — released “Glass Onion” in about 600 theaters. While significantly less than the 4,000-plus theaters most big movies open in, the Netflix film reportedly grossed about $15 million — an enviable total for a medium scaled release.
Netflix declined to release ticket sales and pulled “Glass Onion” on Tuesday, preferring to keep its release limited to a one-week sneak-peak theatrical run before debuting on the streaming service Dec. 23. Netflix’s focus, its executives have said, is driving subscribers to its streaming service. On Wednesday, Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, acknowledged the company left “lots” of money on the table in the move.
So instead of feasting on “Glass Onion,” as ticket buyers did after Thanksgiving in 2019 when Lionsgate released “Knives Out,” moviegoers were fed mostly leftovers this weekend.
For four weeks, the Walt Disney Co.’s “Wakanda Forever” has ruled the box office. Ryan Coogler’s Marvel movie has totaled $733 million globally, including $339 million in overseas sales.
“Violent Night” was the only new wide release in cinemas. Starring David Harbour as a not-so-saintly Saint Nick, the Universal release got off to a good start. “Violent Night,” which earned a B+ CinemaScore from audiences, cost about $20 million to make.
Though “Avatar: The Way of Water” and other holiday releases like “Puss in Boots 2,” “Babylon” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” loom in the coming weeks, theaters continue to see fewer films in wide release than they did pre-pandemic. David A. Gross, who publishes the box-office subscription newsletter FranchiseRe, says that while there were 58 franchise films released in 2019, there have been only 32 in 2022.
There’s also been a dearth of family releases in theaters. After a muted debut last weekend, Disney’s big-budget animated fantasy adventure “Strange World” dipped to third place with a mere $4.9 million in its second week. Some of the season’s notable kid-friendly movies are streaming, instead.
The Roald Dahl adaptation “Matilda the Musical,” starring Emma Thompson, was made jointly by Netflix, Sony Pictures and Working Title Films. Netflix has worldwide distribution rights to the film except for the United Kingdom and Ireland, where Sony put the film into theaters last weekend. For two weeks, “Matilda” has been the top film at the U.K. box office, grossing $9.7 million over that stretch. In the U.S., “Matilda” begins steaming on Christmas.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. “Wakanda Forever,” $17.6 million.
2. “Violent Night,” $13.3 million.
3. “Strange World,” $4.9 million.
4. “The Menu,” $3.6 million.
5. “Devotion,” $2.8 million.
6. “I Heard the Bells,” $1.8 million.
7. “Black Adam,” $1.7 million.
8. “The Fabelmans,” $1.3 million.
9. “Bones and All,” $1.2 million.
10. “Ticket to Paradise,” $850,000.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
After a pared down, pandemic-affected edition in 2021, the BFI London Film Festival is back in full swing
LONDON — After a pared down, pandemic-affected edition in 2021, the BFI London Film Festival is back in full swing this year.
The annual event kicks off Wednesday evening with the premiere of a new, musical action adaptation of “Matilda” — the first time in a decade that a family-friendly film has opened the festival.
Based on the story by Roald Dahl and featuring the songs of Tim Minchin, newcomer Alisha Weir takes the lead role with support from stars Emma Thompson, Lashana Lynch and Stephen Graham. All are expected to walk the red carpet at the Royal Festival Hall on opening night.
Speaking ahead of the gala, festival director Tricia Tuttle called the choice of opening film “joyous,” adding that “it plays really well to everyone.”
The London Film Festival is in its 66th year, and prides itself for being more “audience facing” than other festivals across the globe.
“If you’re a public ticket buyer, you can walk the red carpet. You can’t do that at lots of film festivals. And that’s really very much part of our identity,” Tuttle said.
Celebrities expected to attend this year include actor/producer Jennifer Lawrence with “Causeway,” Timothee Chalamet with Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance “Bones and All,” and Cate Blanchett and Christoph Waltz for Guillermo del Toro’s stop motion animation “Pinocchio.”
The festival closes on Sunday Oct. 16 with the premiere of Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion,” starring Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe and Leslie Odom Jr.
