Ophrah Winfrey is looking to adapt Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water as her next movie.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Winfrey has purchased the rights to adapt The Covenant of Water as her next film project following 2023’s The Color Purple. Published in May 2023, the novel’s story revolves around an Indian family who “loses at least one person each generation due to a drowning.”
Oprah explains why getting The Covenant of Water made might be challenging
Given the subject matter, Winfrey said that she might “have a hell of a time getting [the movie] done because it’s also a story about people of color.”
She continued, “I think that everybody is so afraid and controlled by what they feel is going to work. There is a great loss in people understanding the true power of storytelling that has brought us through eras in Hollywood where you could tell a story like The English Patient and you could tell a story like the original Color Purple and audiences would respond. And now if you don’t have a brand, already marketable brand behind it, it’s hard to sit in a room and pitch a story,” she lamented. “Because unless you’re saying, ‘I’m bringing Rihanna or Beyonce or Taylor or one of the people who have 200 million followers, people are like, ‘What’s the hook?’ …. So I think that that is true for certainly telling stories about people of color. And I think it’s also true for everybody who’s trying to do some serious filmmaking about all stories. It’s challenging.
“There’s nothing we can sell in that, inside that. There’s no dolls you can make and there’s no product you can conjure from it. So listen, I am here in the space of finding and creating stories as an offering to the world to show the world to itself and to try to do that in a way that lets in particular, not just exclusively, but in particular people of color see the reflection of themselves in the highest light.”
Winfrey is one of the producers who worked on The Color Purple, which is currently playing in United States theaters. The Covenant of Water does not yet have a release date.
