The latest rumor out of Hollywood is that Deborah Cadbury’s 2010 book, Chocolate Wars, is to be made into a TV drama.
According to film Industry blog Deadline, Fable Pictures has reportedly optioned the screen rights to the story of the invention of the chocolate bar and the fascinating rivalries that have driven centuries of chocolate empire-building.
The battles centre on three British Quaker family dynasties (Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry), and American entrepreneurs Milton Hershey and Forrest Mars, with European firms Nestlé and Lindt also fighting for a piece of the market.
Producer Faye Ward (The Crown, Suffragette) has optioned the book through her Fable Pictures production company and writer Smita Bhide and director Tom Harper are reportedly on board the project which Ward, Harper and Hannah Farrell will executive produce.
The treatment will follow the book’s 150 years of Cadbury history, blending historical fact and fiction and telling the story of two very different brothers George and Richard Cadbury “in a whirlwind tale of romance, betrayal and rivalry that will also explore the industrial revolution and the roots of capitalism as we know it today,” according to Deadline.
Locations for the story will have an international flavor - from Birmingham in the UK, to Trinidad to Pennsylvania and Switzerland.
‘Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers’
In the early nineteenth century, the major English chocolate firms - Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury - were all Quaker family enterprises that aimed to do well by doing good. The English chocolatiers introduced the world's first chocolate bar and ever fancier chocolate temptations - while also writing groundbreaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against human rights abuses.
Chocolate was always a global business, and in the global competitors, especially the Swiss and the Americans Hershey and Mars, the Quaker capitalists met their match. The ensuing chocolate wars would culminate in a multi-billion-dollar showdown pitting Quaker tradition against the cutthroat tactics of a corporate behemoth.