I missed this announcement: The War Of The Worlds is being turned into a BBC series

[friendly_iconoclast]

And unlike the two movies and previous TV series, this one is supposedly going to follow the
novel:

http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/national/article/Poldark-producers-to-make-War-Of-The-Worlds-into-BBC-drama-2107c830-22be-4b9e-8b56-c0ceb73ae990-ds

HG Wells' alien invasion novel The War Of The Worlds is being turned into a British TV drama.

The three-part, BBC One drama, following one man's attempt to escape ruthless Martians, is being made by the producers of TV hits Poldark and Victoria.

It is being billed as the first British TV adaptation of Wells' famous novel, in which the inhabitants of Earth fall victim to a violent invasion, and will be set in Surrey, the book's original location.

Writer Peter Harness, whose credits include Doctor Who, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Wallander, said: "I'm feeling phenomenally lucky to be writing The War Of The Worlds, and blowing up gigantic swathes of the home counties at the dawn of the 20th Century...

...Damien Timmer, managing director of producer Mammoth Screen, said: "It's a great honour to bring HG Wells' masterpiece to BBC One. This huge title - the original alien invasion story - has been loosely adapted and riffed on countless times, but no-one has ever attempted to follow Wells and locate the story in Dorking at the turn of the last century.

This promises to be very, very cool...

[ChazInAz]

1. You missed one.

There was another film version made in England about ten or so years ago. They actually tried to follow Wells' novel, but relied so heavily on green screen and primitive CGI that the result was probably one of the worst movies ever made. (And I'm including Ed Woods' epics.) The poor thing went direct to DVD on Walmart shelves.

[Blue_Adept]

2. This one?

H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (Hines film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells%27_The_War_of_the_Worlds_(Hines_film)

A whopping $25 million budget.

In 2012 a re-imagined, re-edited, and re-thought version, with new material added, was released under the title War of the Worlds – The True Story; this new version, again directed by Timothy Hines, is presented as a faux-documentary. It revisits Wells' novel, portraying its events as historical by way of the documented recollections of a survivor of the Martian invasion.

The film bases its approach on the 1938 Orson Welles CBS radio Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds, by presenting itself as a true account of actual events.[17] Director Timothy Hines said, in reference to this technique, "When Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds on the radio in the late 1930s, he presented it in such a way as to not clearly identify that it was a work of fiction. He did it for the drama. And many people mistook the fictional news broadcast as a real news broadcast. People believed they were hearing an actual invasion from Mars that night. We are approaching the story in the same way, as if it were an actual news documentary".[18][19]

[friendly_iconoclast]

3. Looks like I was lucky to have missed that one

However, this variant looks kind of interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Martian_War

The Great Martian War 1913–1917 is a 2013 Canadian/UK made-for-television science fiction film docudrama, produced by Michael Kot, Steve Maher, and Mike Slee, and also directed by Mike Slee, that unfolds in the style of an episode from the History TV Channel.

The film is, as presented, an alternate history of World War I in which Europe and its allies, and eventually America, fight Martian invaders instead of Germany and its allies. Europe is on tenterhooks in the 2nd decade of the 20th century. Everyone is expecting war between the European powers. Then Germany issues an urgent plea for help that changes the reason for that war. Many references to real events of The Great War are woven into the film's fictional narrative. They include parallels to the conflict's mass battles and defeats, as men are thrown against the war machines on the Western front, the Christmas truce, and the Angel of Mons, and America's isolationism and late entry. There's even a surprising twist on the worldwide "Spanish" flu epidemic that killed more people than the conflict itself.