The Witches (2020 film)

The Witches (also known as Roald Dahl's The Witches), is a 2020 dark fantasy comedy horror film co-produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro, based on the 1983 novel The Witches by Roald Dahl. It is the second film adaptation of the novel, following The Witches (1990). The film stars Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Kristin Chenoweth and Jahzir Bruno.

The Witches was released on the streaming service HBO Max in the United States on October 22, 2020, and had a theatrical release in some markets beginning on October 28, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances and visuals but criticised its script, deeming it inferior to the 1990 film despite being more faithful to the original novel.

Plot
In 1968, young Charlie Hansen lives with his grandmother Agatha in Demopolis, Alabama, after a car accident kills his parents in Chicago. Gradually, she cheers him up by buying him a pet mouse whom he names Daisy.

One day, Charlie plans to buy a box of nails to train Daisy and to build a house for her as well. He is approached by a witch trying to lure him with a snake and a caramel, but Agatha calls him, and the witch disappears.

After telling Agatha about the encounter, Charlie learns that witches are in fact real. She says a witch cursed her childhood friend Alice into spending the rest of her life as a chicken. Agatha says that witches never leave once they find a child.

Frantically, they decide to stay in a nearby hotel where her cousin Eston was the executive chef. While there, Agatha teaches Charlie how to tell a witch from an ordinary woman: real witches have claws instead of fingernails, which they hide by wearing gloves; are bald, which they hide by wearing wigs that give them rashes; have square feet with no toes, have mouths that can open nearly to their ears, and have a powerful sense of smell aided by extendable nostrils, which they use to sniff out children.

The next day, Charlie takes Daisy and a rope to do some training at a grand hall. During his walk there, he meets a gluttonous but friendly boy named Bruno, who is pulled away by his mother. Charlie visits the grand hall, thinking he will be alone.

As he is getting ready to train Daisy, a group of witches led by their all-powerful leader, The Grand High Witch, enters the grand hall. Charlie hides under the stage and overhears her planning to give the world's children a potion, mixed into confectionery products, that will transform them all into mice.

The Grand High Witch waits for Bruno to arrive, to whom she earlier gave a Swiss chocolate bar laced with the potion. After he arrives, he turns into a mouse and enters the vent where Charlie and Daisy are hiding. The Grand High Witch discovers Charlie and forcibly transforms him into a mouse with the potion, before they escape.

Fleeing to the hotel room where Charlie and his grandmother are staying, they tell Agatha about the witches' plan and discover that the Grand High Witch is staying in the hotel room below them and that Daisy was once an orphaned young human girl named Mary turned into a mouse by a witch.

Charlie, Bruno, and Mary devise a plan to get a bottle of the potion so that Agatha can devise a cure to turn them back into children. The plan to get the potion is successful, but as she is unable to create a cure, they instead decide to put the potion into a broth of pea soup which will be given to the witches during their dinner.

All the witches drink the soup except the Grand High Witch, who realises that she met Agatha before, as she was the witch who turned Alice into a chicken. While the mice steal the Grand High Witch's room key, the witches all begin turning into rats, and chaos ensues.

After she and the mice flee to the Grand High Witch's room, Agatha starts to collect all the potions to destroy them. The Grand High Witch finds and tries to kill her, but instead the mice intervene, tricking the witch into swallowing her own potion, transforming her into a rat. They trap her in an ice bucket to prevent her from escaping. Before they leave the room, Agatha takes the Grand High Witch's trunk full of money and also releases her cat Hades from its cage. As they close the door, Hades kills the Grand High Witch.

As his parents can no longer accept him, Bruno joins Mary, Charlie, and Agatha to go home with The Grand High Witch's trunk and become a family. Over the following years, Charlie and Agatha travel the world, advising young children to eradicate the witches.

Development
Talks of a new adaptation of Dahl's novel began in December 2008, when Guillermo del Toro expressed interest in making a stop motion film. No further developments on the potential project emerged until 10 years later in June 2018, when Robert Zemeckis was hired to direct and write the script. Del Toro would produce, alongside Zemeckis and Alfonso Cuarón, in addition to having a screenplay credit.

The film takes place in the United States, in Alabama during the 1960s, instead of the novel's 1980s England and Norway, and the boy protagonist is African-American, instead of Norwegian-British like the boy in the original novel and previous adaptations. Nevertheless, the adaptation was described by Zemeckis as being closer to the original novel than the 1990 adaptation, directed by Nicolas Roeg. Kenya Barris co-wrote the film.

Casting
In January 2019, Anne Hathaway was cast in the role of Grand High Witch. Octavia Spencer was cast in February, with newcomers Jahzir Bruno and Codie-Lei Eastick also joining. In May, Stanley Tucci and Chris Rock were added. In September 2020 it was revealed that Kristin Chenoweth was cast in the film.

Filming
Principal photography began on May 8, 2019, with filming locations including Alabama and Georgia in the US, and at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden in Hertfordshire, and Virginia Water Lake in Surrey, both in England. It was expected to wrap on June 25. On June 19, crew member Darren Langford was stabbed in the neck with a Stanley knife on the Warner Bros. Studios set in Leavesden. On March 18, 2021, crew member Johnny Walker was convicted of wounding with intent.

Marketing
The film collaborated with a Roblox game named Islands for a limited-time Halloween event. It features a boss battle with the Grand High Witch, the main antagonist of the film.

Music
In July 2019, Zemeckis's regular collaborator, Alan Silvestri, was revealed to be scoring the film. A soundtrack featuring Silvestri's score released by WaterTower Music on October 23, 2020.

Release
The Witches was scheduled to be released on October 16, 2020. On October 25, 2019, Warner Bros. moved up the release of the film by a week. However, on June 12, 2020, Warner Bros. announced that they pulled the film off the 2020 schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film was digitally released in the United States on October 22, 2020, via HBO Max. In November, Variety reported the film was the ninth-most watched straight-to-streaming title of 2020 up to that point.

In some countries that have no access to HBO Max, the film was released in theaters a week later since its digital release.

Home media
The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on June 14, 2022.

Box office
The film grossed $4.9 million in 12 countries in its first week of release. During the weekend of November 20, the film made $1.2 million from 23 countries, for a running total of $15.1 million. By January 4, 2021, the film had a running total of $26 million from 32 countries.

Critical response
The film was criticised for its writing, and was deemed inferior to Roeg's film. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that of  critic reviews are positive for The Witches, with an average rating of. The website's critics consensus reads: "The Witches misses a few spells, but Anne Hathaway's game performance might be enough to bewitch fans of this Roald Dahl tale." According to Metacritic, which sampled 31 critics and calculated a weighted average score of 47 out of 100, the film received "mixed or average reviews".

In his two out of four star review, Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the special effects and the performances, but found the film to be "far too disturbing for young children and not edgy enough to captivate adults." David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a D+ calling the film "dreadful" and stating, "Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but The Witches is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could've been made by somebody else. Anybody else. Roeg's version may have scarred a generation of kids for life, but at least they remembered it."

Controversy
Numerous disability advocates, including British Paralympic swimmer Amy Marren, accused the film of perpetuating bias against individuals with ectrodactyly and other limb differences. Lauren Appelbaum, a spokesperson for advocacy group RespectAbility, said the film portrays limb differences as "hideous or something to be afraid of." On November 4, 2020, Warner Bros. issued a statement in which they apologised for offending people with disabilities. They further added that they had worked with "designers and artists to come up with a new interpretation of the cat-like claws that are described in the book. [...] The film is about kindness. [...] It was never the intention for viewers to feel that the fantastical, non-human creatures were meant to represent them." Hathaway also issued an apology over the film's portrayal, saying "I particularly want to say I'm sorry to kids with limb differences... Now that I know better I promise I'll do better."