A Willy Wonka Prequel Movie Is a Bad Idea, Especially Considering All the Slavery
Photos Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
A prequel film for a beloved pop culture figure is almost always a bad idea. The mythical, vague qualities of those that tend to stick out as characters rely on a bit of mystery so that the audience can fill in the gaps with their imagination. Writing and performances that are confident in our intelligence put us into the story far better than having everything spelled out. Han Solo is cool. A random guy given the name “Solo” because of what amounts to lazy military enlistment is not cool at all. So, news that Warner Bros. is actually moving forward with Wonka—a prequel film about the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory owner/eccentric—already makes me think it’s going to have bad, bad results. And that’s not even considering that the source material’s main information on Willy Wonka’s past is that he was a slaver.
Willy Wonka’s already been solidified into the pop culture canon by an incredible, unhinged, funny and moving performance by Gene Wilder in 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Hell, even Johnny Depp did something relatively memorable with the character in Tim Burton’s 2005 remake. To try to compete with those for a prequel story is studio IP addiction at its worst. Sure, Paddington director Paul King has certainly proven himself with classic British staples, but the sweet bear certainly has a less checkered past than Wonka.
Wonka’s present is already questionable enough, what with his Saw-like series of deadly candy seductions designed to weed out any undesirable kids. But his past—how exactly he staffed his factory with Oompa-Loompas—is something that was criticized so deeply during the ‘70s that Roald Dahl himself rewrote his book. The brief synopsis of Wonka that’s been released notes that the film will be about “a young Willy Wonka and his adventures prior to opening the world’s most famous chocolate factory.” The only “adventures” really touched on in 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory involves Wonka smuggling Oompa-Loompas out of Africa. They were “imported” in “crates with holes” from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before” in the original text, which depicted them as straight-up African Pygmy people. Nope, they didn’t always come from “Loompaland.” Probably not a past worth visiting for a children’s film.