Fresh off his nomination for Best Actor at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, Bradley Cooper has just signed to star in the Warner Bros. adaptation of Howard Blum's book Dark Invasion. Cooper will play NYPD Captain Tom Tunney, a man who must put together a team during World War I to bring German spies to justice.
Will there be a Jack Reacher sequel? Paramount Studios is waiting to see how the film fares in Asia before making a decision, but the film hasn't performed well enough at the box office in the U.S. alone to make it a done deal.
Ewan McGregor has joined the cast of the espionage thriller Our Kind of Traitor, an adaptation of John Le Carre's 2010 novel about a British couple who become entangled with the Russian Mafia and the British Secret Service.
Dylan McDermott is set to star in the action-thriller Freezer, playing an everyman character kidnapped by Russian thugs and locked inside an industrial freezer for reasons unknown.
Martin Scorsese is moving ahead with his mob drama based on the Charles Brandt book I Heard You Paint Houses. He held a reading of Steve Zaillian's script for the project, which already has signed Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci to star.
The producers of RED 2, the action-thriller sequel to the original 2010 RED, released a trailer for the film. Stars Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren are reprising their roles as older government agents who are nostalgic for their espionage days of yore, while Anthony Hopkins takes a turn as the villain.
TV
The new period police thriller Ripper Street premiered on BBC America. The series stars Matthew MacFadyen as Inspector Edmund Reid, head of the notorious H Division, the toughest district in London's East End. He's joined by Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) as Reid's right-hand man and Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) as an American ex-Pinkerton agent and an expert in the world of early forensics.
TNT has given a ten-episode order to King and Maxwell, based on the novels of David Baldacci, starring Jon Tenney (The Closer) and Rebecca Romijn (X-Men) as former Secret Service agents turned private eyes.
Steven Bochco, the creator of such shows as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, is behind a new pilot for TNT titled Murder in the First that is set in San Francisco area and involves two seemingly unrelated murder investigations. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
TNT has also ordered a pilot for an untitled quirky bounty hunter drama starring Geena Davis, inspired by the real-life story of bounty hunter Mackenzie Green.
CBS has given the greenlight to the political thriller pilot Hostages from writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Jerry Bruckheimer Television and Warner Bros. The plot revolves around a political conspiracy when a family is taken hostage - the family happens to be that of a successful surgeon (Toni Collette) who's just been tasked with operating on the President of the United States.
Syfy's series Alphas, about a crime-fighting team with unusual abilities, has been cancelled after two seasons.
ABC has delayed the premiere date for the third season of Body of Proof until February 19, to avoid scheduling conflicts. The new season has a revamped cast, including Mark Valley who joins the procedural as Tommy Sullivan, a man with a romantic connection to Dana Delany's Megan Hunt.
Tamron Hall has signed to host a new series for the mystery-and-suspense network, Investigation Discovery The 13-part series, Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall, features a core team of law enforcement correspondents who try to determine not only what happened with each profiled case, but why it happened and how it was investigated.
PODCASTS/VIDEO
Vermont Public Radio interviewed Quebec murder mystery author Louise Penny, discussing her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series.
Philip Quarles and WNYC discusses and posts audio from a speech given by Rex Stout (creator of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin), which he gave to a 1966 Books and Authors Luncheon. He discusses his career as a writer and his "beef" with the FBI.
Every Saturday from noon to 2 pm PT, Margaret McLean hosts It's A Crime Radio on itsacrimeradio.com or NBC News Radio KCAA 1050 Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Topics include crime, law, and courtroom drama including the upcoming trial of James "Whitey" Bulger.
THEATER
Vancouver's Vertigo Mystery Theatre is presenting PatRick Hamilton's Gaslight, directed by Christopher Newton, with previews beginning January 26. The play is best known for its 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton and Angela Lansbury in her on-screen debut.
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