'A Wrinkle In Time' Could Be The Start Of A Stunning New Female-Led Sci-Fi Series

A Wrinkle in Time promises to blow audiences' minds with its stunning sceneries, heroic female characters, and sci-fi time traveling. If you know nothing about the plot before watching it, you'll probably be even more awed than the people who adore the book upon which it's based. What you should know about A Wrinkle in Time the book, though, is that it's part of a series known as the Time Quintet, written by Madeleine L’Engle. That theoretically means that A Wrinkle in Time could get a sequel, but it seems unlikely that the movie, directed by Ava DuVernay, will lead to A Wrinkle in Time 2.

The other books in L’Engle's series are named A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time, but none of those stories achieved the level of popularity that A Wrinkle in Time — the first in the series — did. L’Engle's A Wrinkle in Time came out in 1962, and according to Time, it still hasn't gone out of print. That means its in such high-demand that the publisher must continue to make more copies, all these years later. Time also revealed that in 2012, for the book's 50th anniversary, over 10 million copies were sold worldwide.

Clearly, even before DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling became involved in the movie version of the book,Wrinkle had momentous popularity. The other works in the Time Quintet series aren't as well known, so it wouldn't be a big surprise if they weren't made into movies later on. As The Verge pointed out, the fact that A Wrinkle in Time is part of a book series might have incentivized Disney to make the movie, given that the studio makes so many sequels.

But even though the source material for DuVernay's fantastical film offers potential for Wrinkle to become a film series, this movie seems like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If you think that A Wrinkle in Time has immeasurable star power in it, that's because DuVernay wanted to fill the movie with superstars. "I wasn’t just casting for actresses. I was casting for leaders — icons," DuVernay told Time. She explained why Witherspoon, Winfrey, and Kaling made the perfect choices, saying, “When I think about the three of them together as a unit of celestial beings, it feels right.”

Not only does Wrinkle include a cast of so-called "celestial beings," but the sheer size of the film's production made history. With A Wrinkle in Time, Ava DuVernay became the first black woman to direct a movie with a $100 million budget. It's so exciting that a movie about a girl bravely venturing into unfamiliar worlds (literally) allowed DuVernay herself to break new barriers.

Even though DuVernay, Kaling, Winfrey, and Witherspoon might together make up a group of the most influential women in Hollywood, A Wrinkle in Time's real star is its protagonist, Meg Murry, played by Storm Reid. As Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter for the film, told Collider, "That is a girl who could represent all of us, and everything about her, in her heart and soul, blew me away."

Since Meg is the protagonist of the other books in the Time Quintet series, the possibility of a Wrinkle in Time sequel would largely depend upon her. DuVernay likely won't be available to make another movie in the near future as she's already set to direct a miniseries about the Central Park Five for Netflix. However, if Reid wants to play Meg again and if Disney wants to make a second movie soon, it very well could happen. As A Wrinkle in Time makes clear, anything can happen.