Netflix’s Willy Wonka Reality Show Replaces Kids with Adults and Gene Wilder with AI
Long before Squid Game, Willy Wonka was inviting contestants into a brightly colored nightmare and eliminating them one by one. Netflix has finally connected those dots and, unsurprisingly, turned it into a reality show. Even stranger but also somehow not unexpected, they’ve chosen to remove the children and resurrect Gene Wilder with AI.
The first full trailer for Wonka’s The Golden Ticket has arrived, revealing Netflix’s nine-episode reality competition built around Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Twelve adult contestants and their chosen partners enter a recreation of Wonka’s factory, where they’ll compete in challenges and navigate various “temptations” for a “life-changing prize.”
Gone are Charlie Bucket, Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop, and in their place are grown adults sprinting through candy-colored sets, forming alliances, giving confessionals, and screaming with the intensity reality television has taught us is appropriate when someone unveils a large piece of chocolate.
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There is, however, a Willy Wonka. Or at least his voice.
Rather than cast someone new, Netflix partnered with AI company ElevenLabs to recreate Gene Wilder’s voice, with permission from the late actor’s estate. Wilder, who died in 2016, can now be heard digitally guiding contestants through the factory, explaining rules, and generally lending some borrowed magic to a television show made 55 years after he played the character.
The decision is strange. Wilder’s Wonka worked because there was something impossible to pin down under every line – sweetness, menace, exhaustion, amusement, sometimes all at once. Now that voice has been reduced to something software can summon, no one imagined that.
At least one person from the original film is actually returning in the flesh. Rusty Goffe, who played an Oompa Loompa in the 1971 movie, reprises the role, and Netflix’s recreations of the chocolate river and other corners of Wonka’s factory are at least better than the last time someone took a swing at it.
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket premieres September 23rd, with a two-part finale arriving September 30th. Watch the trailer below and enter a world of pure “imagination,” where children are nowhere to be found but the disembodied voice of Gene Wilder is.
