Disney Changing Gender of Lead Character in Adaptation of Beloved Book: News on Disney+ ‘Holes’ Revamp

Holes is undergoing a major change for one of its characters. The Disney film is now becoming a television series adapted by Disney+, this time with a female lead, Deadline reports. Written by Alina Mankin with Liz Phang as showrunner, the series will follow a teenage girl who is sent to a detention camp where a Warden forces the campers to dig holes for an unknown purpose.

Phang and Mankin serve as executive producers, with Drew Goddard and Sarah Esberg of Goddard Textiles. The film’s producer Mike Medavoy is also on board. 

Directed by Andrew Davis from a script by Sachar, the film starred Shia LaBeouf as Stanley, who gets sentenced to 18 months of hard labor at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention camp. Other actors who starred in the film included Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson and Eartha Kitt. 

The film received mixed reviews. A review from The New York Times about the 2003 film praised it for being a film that could teach both children and adults good lessons. “And it deals with these themes more honestly and with more respect for the audience’s intelligence than most movies aimed at supposed grown-ups,” the review notes.

The movie is based on the 1998 novel of the same title written by Louis Sachar and first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The books’ central themes include labor, boyhood and masculinity, friendship, meaning of names, illiteracy, elements of fairy tales, and racism.