The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar will release an episode 2 of sorts with subsequent shorts The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison set to release on Netflix very soon. HITC breaks down the schedule for the incoming adventures.
What do you get when you cross the endlessly imaginative works of Roald Dahl with the visual mastery of visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson? Greatness, as we learned from the beloved 2009 movie Fantastic Mr. Fox, which served as an adaptation of the author’s 1970 story. Now we have an adaptation of The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar on Netflix starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Indeed, there’s an episode 2, 3, and 4 on the way—well, sort of….
The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar episode 2
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was released on Wednesday, September 27th 2023, and marks the first of four Roald Dahl adaptations from Wes.
Each will be a short rather than feature length, telling a new story rather than following on from the previous.
The second is The Swan, a short story from Roald’s 1977 collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. The third short is The Ratcatcher, which brings to the screen one of the British author’s more unsettling stories.
Then, last but not least, the fourth and final short is Poison, the source material of which was
originally published in the American magazine Collier’s.
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Netflix shorts
The American filmmakers behind such hits as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Asteroid City will helm all four of the shorts, and they’ll premiere across four days with the schedule as follows:
Each is available for streaming exclusively on Netflix.
‘Henry Sugar is the longest one’
Wes was recently interviewed by Deadline and gave an insight into what to expect from the three remaining shorts.
“Well, there’s one where Ralph Fiennes plays a rodent exterminator, it’s a story called The Ratcatcher that Dahl wrote, I think, in the ’50s,” he began. “That’s got Richard Ayoade, and it’s got Rupert Friend. Just a little group. It’s probably 13 minutes, or something like that.
“Henry Sugar is the longest one [of the project]. Significantly longer. It’s more than twice as long as any of the others. Then we also have one called Poison. That’s an old Dahl story. Maybe from the early ’40s, or mid-’40s, I guess. For that one, we’ve got Benedict Cumberbatch again, we’ve got Ben Kingsley again, and we’ve got Dev Patel again. So that’s a completely different group from The Rat Catcher.”
In addition, “we’ve also done The Swan, which is from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. That’s essentially just Rupert Friend, who was great by himself. And that’s quite a short one as well.”
The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar is now streaming on Netflix.