Margaret Atwood Says She Didn’t Get Any Of The Profits From ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ TV Show

It’s pretty uncontroversial that The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the best TV shows of last year. The award-winning adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel was creepy, devastating, and absolutely captivating, and so hugely popular it helped streaming service Hulu’s ad revenue top $1 billion.

And yet, as it turns out, Margaret Atwood says she didn’t receive any of those profits herself. That’s because she sold the rights to the work to film studio MGM back in 1990, when they made a film version of the story that has since sunk into obscurity.

Those film rights, however, were then sold on to MGM Television, which then sold them to Hulu. As Atwood herself put it, “the Handmaid’s Tale television series was not my deal… we did not have a negotiating position”.

However, Atwood did make some money from the show. She was brought on as an executive consultant, and the show’s popularity boosted her book sales so much that she became the UK’s best selling literary novelist of the year, with almost £2.8m in sales.

But still, there’s something a bit off about the female creator of a book about the exploitation of women missing out on the vast majority of the income her work generated. How good is the entertainment industry?