Here’s why Meg’s twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, were completely cut from “Wrinkle In Time”

Disney’s latest fantastical movie, A Wrinkle In Time, doesn’t stray far from the source material, and the movie very much mirrors the 1962 novel by the same name. Sure, there are little changes here and there, but nothing too major — except when it comes to the complete removal of two Murry children, Sandy and Dennys.

Meg Murry is still the oldest child in the family, and Charles Wallace Murry is still the baby. But in the original novel, there are two other children in the family, 10-year-old twins Sandy and Dennys. However, they are nowhere to be found in the movie like…at all. They didn’t disappear into any sort of tesseract by accident, because they were purposely not included in the story for a pretty important reason. Why get rid of the twins? Simply, A Wrinkle In Time needed to be completely focused on Meg’s journey, and the twins would have gotten in the way.

“It was something I proposed did in the very beginning with the script of saying ‘Look, we are not trying to do the book. We are trying to do an homage, and a love of the book and a celebration of the book, but we have to make choices that work in cinema and what we need,’” Wrinkle’s screenwriter Jennifer Lee explained to HelloGiggles during the movie’s press day in Los Angeles. “The truth was the part of their journey that was there [for them] was not the part we needed most for Meg. We also needed to add in Veronica [Rowan Blanchard’s character], who was not in the book.”

“We needed to add more of the high school,” Lee continues. “We had to add more of the scenes with the father. We really need to anchor this in the true emotion and understand why she feels the way she feels and the brothers would add a layer to that. But of all that we wanted to accomplish in this, it was that layer that was like putting some extra salt on at the time.”

So, the twins were cut. But if you’re familiar with the Time Quintet — made up of Wrinkle, along with A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time — you know that one of these novels actually belongs to Sandy and Dennys’s journey. Many Waters is all about the boys getting mixed up in one of their dad’s science experiments.

Lee knows that if there’s a sequel (or four sequels) to Wrinkle, the twin’s absence will of course be felt. However, as she notes, “This is a wonderful family who adopts children so I don’t know, maybe that’ll be fine,” meaning that it’s explained that Charles Wallace has been adopted in this version.

“I think there are always ways around [explaining where the twins are] but I had to do it for all the things we had to do for [Meg,] and we didn’t need them.” And as Lee laughs, compared to Meg, “They had such easy lives. When you read it, they really did.”

So maybe we’ll see them in the future, maybe not. Let’s just hope that if A Wrinkle in Time gets a sequel, it steers clear of Many Waters.