Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

The 86th Academy Awards were held last night, and one of the big winners included crime drama Dallas Buyers Club for Best Actor, Matthew McConaughey and Best Supporting Actor, Jared Leto.

20 Century Fox has tapped Charles Leavitt to adapt Michael Koryta’s book Those Who Wish Me Dead, due out for publication in May. The novel centers on "a teenage murder witness lost in the Montana wilderness, the twin assassins hunting him, a survival expert tasked with protecting him, and a forest fire that threatens to consume them all."

Warner Bros. acquired American Blood, a crime novel by New Zealand author Ben Sanders that will be published in 2015. The project has Bradley Cooper attached to produce and also star as an NYPD officer turned mob informant in a witness protection program who gets drawn into the investigation of a missing woman. (Hat tip to Crime Watch.)

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's dark crime comedy Inherent Vice has been given a release date of December 12. The project is based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Reese Witherspoon and Martin Short.

The film adaptation of the TV series The Equalizer isn't due for release until September, but apparently it's already "testing through the roof." In fact, the buzz is so great that the production company is already planning a sequel. The project stars Denzel Washington as the title character, a retired intelligence officer who combats injustices against those who can't seek protection from the law.

David Michod's thriller The Rover, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, has been given a release date in July. The project is set in a world following the collapse of the western economic system, where Australia’s mineral resources have drawn the desperados and dangerous to its shores, including a hardened loner (Pearce) and a wounded car thief (Pattinson).

James Bond fans will be happy to note that filming on Bond 24 will begin in October, with a release date for 2015. Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes, and director Sam Mendes are all returning for the project.

Yes, they're remaking Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and Universal just announced they've hired Dutch director Diederik Van Rooijen to helm the film. The project has been in the making for several years, and the studio once indicated that the redo will owe more to Daphne du Maurier's short story than the Hitchcock version.

TELEVISION

BBC is commissioning two new Agatha Christie adaptations of And Then There Were None, the author's most successful work, and Partners In Crime. The latter is planned as a six-part series featuring crime-fighting duo Tommy and Tuppence. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Omnimystery News reported that the recently-cancelled BBC show Ripper Street is being revived by Amazon, which ordered a third season to stream ahead of the broadcast via Amazon's new Amazon Prime Instant Video serivce in the UK. The broadcast version will be co-produced in the U.S. by BBC America, with shooting set to start in May.

Fox has acquired Cold Comfort (a/k/a How To Catch A Russian Spy), a film to be directed by Marc Webb. The plot is said to be based on the true account of an American civilian-turned-self-taught spy, who worked with the FBI to bring down a Russian intelligence agent on American soil.

Fox is also developing a "series event" based on the gory Manson murders, with the writing help of writer Bret Easton Ellis and musician Rob Zombie.

British actor Max Brown has been cast as the lead in Fox's 13-episode action-adventure series Hieroglyph, set in ancient Egypt. Brown will play a notorious thief plucked from prison to serve the Pharoah (Reece Ritchie), "navigating palace intrigue, seductive concubines, criminal underbellies and even a few divine sorcerers."

Feature writer Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift) is returning to television to create a conspiracy thriller drama for TNT titled Black Box. The plot hinges on three strangers whose lives are forever changed following the crash of an airliner that may not have been accidental.

Dylan McDermott has signed on to star in the untitled pilot for CBS from Kevin Williamson (The Following). The story is described as "a psychological thriller revolving around two detectives, Beth and Jack (McDermott), who handle stalking incidents for the Threat Assessment Unit of the LAPD."

Oscar-nominated actress Viola Davis (The Help) has signed to star in the Shonda Rhimes pilot How to Get Away with Murder. Davis will play a brilliant and mysterious criminal defense professor whose students become involved in a murder plot that could rock their entire university and change the course of their lives.

FX released a clip from their upcoming adaptation of the film Fargo. The projects stars Billy Bob Thornton as a drifter named Lorne Malvo who arrives in small-town Minnesota and influences the population with his malice and violence, including down-on-his-luck insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, played by Sherlock's Martin Freeman.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest Crime and Science Radio podcast is titled "Working the Crime Scene: An interview With Forensic Specialist Lisa Black."