Can Steven Spielberg Make The Color Purple a Hit Once Again?

By Michael Tran/Getty Images.

The Color Purple finished its Broadway revival run in January 2017, but it didn’t take long for that iteration of the Alice Walker novel to make another comeback. The Hollywood Reporter says that Celie, Sofia, Shug Avery, and co. will return to the big screen in a musical adaptation produced by Steven Spielberg as well as Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and Scott Sanders, the group that produced the Broadway musical.

It’s some serious déjà vu for Spielberg and Winfrey, who teamed up for the 1985 film adaptation of the novel, which was nominated for 11 Oscars. The book, a 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winner, was first adapted as a musical in 2005; the recent Broadway revival won a Tony Award for Cynthia Erivo and for best musical revival. As THR notes, the revival brought in a much more diverse audience than most Broadway productions, with 50 percent of ticket-buyers for the musical coming from the black community.

“This is a movie about endurance and it’s about survival,” Winfrey said in a 1985 interview about the film. It’s about Celie’s quest for herself . . . what I want people to understand is if Celie could do it, you could do it, too. It allows you to know that we’re all responsible for ourselves, that there’s such great love and joy inside all of us, that God really does get pissed if you ignore the color purple.”

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