The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Wes Anderson's 40-minute short film based on Roald Dahl's 1977 story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, received a nearly four-minute standing ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere. Variety reported that the project, which is made up of several short films (Henry Sugar, The Swan, Poison and The Ratcatcher), "is notable for being Anderson's first with Netflix. It's also his second Dahl adaptation after his beloved stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox."
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Rupert Friend, Dev Patel, and Ben Kingsley, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar debuts September 27 on Netflix.
In an interview with IndieWire, Anderson had previously explained his decision to team up with Netflix for the first time despite his preference for theatrical exhibition: "In my case it's a little bit of a weird thing. I knew Roald Dahl since before we made Fantastic Mr. Fox. I met Lindsay Dahl, his widow, when we were shooting The Royal Tenenbaums like 20 years ago. For years I wanted to do Henry Sugar. They set this story aside for me because I was friends with them. Lindsay kind of handed the torch to Luke, Dahl's grandson. So I had this waiting for me. But I really couldn't figure out the approach. I knew what I liked in the story was the writing of it, Dahl's words. I couldn't find the answer, and then suddenly I did. It's not a feature film. It's like 37 minutes or something. But by the time I was ready to do it, the Dahl family no longer had the rights at all. They had sold the whole deal to Netflix.
"Suddenly, in essence, there was nowhere else you could do it since they own it. But beyond it, because it's a 37-minute movie, it was the perfect place to do it because it's not really a movie. You know they used to do these BBC things called Play for Today directed by people like Steven Frears and John Schlesinger and Alan Clarke. They were one-hour programs or even less. I kind of envisioned something like that."