“Atlas Shrugged” TV Series In The Works

Conservative media company The Daily Wire has optioned the exclusive screen rights to Ayn Rand’s dystopian 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” with plans for a TV series adaptation of the novel.

Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing announced the deal in a live-streamed town hall address. The plan is for the series to be distributed through the company’s Dailywire+ streaming platform.

The 1,000-page novel centers on Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive trying to keep her corporation competitive in a dystopian United States where private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome regulations which she sees as hostile to innovation.

She teams with steel magnate Hank Rearden to build a transcontinental railroad and soon discovers that a mysterious figure named John Galt is persuading other business leaders to abandon their companies and disappear with plans to build a new society based on Galt’s philosophy.

Among its most famous passages is a 50-page speech from Galt, regarded as a veiled expression of Rand’s own ideas, which promoted her philosophy of objectivism.

The property has often been seen as a canonical work in conservative literature, and multiple attempts have been made to adapt the property over the decades, with the likes of Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie attached to previously failed adaptations.

Businessman and producer John Aglialoro managed to produce a low-budget film trilogy based on the property a decade ago – albeit films that ended up changing key cast members with each entry.

Aglialoro, Jeremy Boreing, Ben Shapiro, Caleb Robinson, Dallas Sonnier, Harmon Kaslow and Amanda Presmyk are producing.

The series will join Daily Wire’s lineup of film and TV content which include Gina Carano western “Terror On The Prairie” and D.J. Caruso’s thriller “Shut In”.

Source: Deadline