Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Universal is moving forward with a remake of Scarface, hiring Jonathan Herman to do the rewrite and Pablo Larraín to direct. The new film is said to be an update and will be set in Los Angeles intead of Miami, exploring an immigrant's rise in the criminal underworld.

Black List screenwriter Annie Neal has been tapped to pen a script re-imagining Agatha Christie as a swashbuckling sleuth. The spec script for Agatha is described as "an action adventure in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes meets Romancing the Stone," and focuses on the eleven days Christie went missing in 1926 that led to a media frenzy.

Lionsgate is in negotiations to acquire the rights to Anna Carey's YA novel Blackbird, with Danny Mackey to potentialy pen the adaptation. The story centers on a game of cat-and-mouse that ensues with a young girl wakes up on the tracks of the L.A. subway with no memory, a tattoo of a blackbird, a code, and instructions not to call the police.

Alchemy Entertainment has acquired U.S. rights to distribute the all-star espionage thriller Survivor, with a cast that includes Milla Jovovich, Emma Thompson, Robert Forster, Angela Bassett, James D'Arcy, Dylan McDermott and Brosnan as the bad guy. The film centers on a Foreign Service officer (Jovovich) who tries to prevent a terrorist attack but is forced to go on the run after being framed for crimes she didn't commit.

Jeff Robinov’s Studio 8 picked up feature rights to the high-concept thriller The Brain Hack from writer-director Joe White, which centers on two students who create a way to induce hallucinogenic visions of God and then are stalked by a mysterious cult bent on destroying them.

The 17th Annual Los Angeles Film Noir Festival (a/k/a NOIR CITY: Hollywood), is scheduled for April 3–19, 2015 at the Egyptian Theatre. This year's program includes tributes to actors Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck and novelists Dorothy B. Hughes and Cornell Woolrich. (Hat tip Mystery Fanfare.)

The first trailer for the latest installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise was released, with Tom Cruise returning as Ethan Hawk.

TELEVISION

Bosch has been given a second-season order by Amazon after only a month into its first season. The series is based on Michael Connelly's novels featuring LAPD cop, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, and stars Titus Welliver in the title role.

Steven Moffat, co-creator of Sherlock along with Mark Gatiss, told Entertainment Weekly that the crew had been filming a special episode set in the Victorian era, which will be separate from the new series. As to how the detective duo wind up back in the 1880s, Moffat has been cagey. No date has been set by the BBC for the broadcast, but it's expected to air during the Christmas 2015 period.

Kelli Williams (The Practice) has been cast as the lead in the UP network’s first scripted series, Ties That Bind. Williams will a tough police detective who has to bring her brother's teenage children into her own home after she arrests the brother for aggravated assault, and he's sent to prison.

Sony Pictures TV has sold a 10-episode series to Fox that's based on the real-life friendship between Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and illusionist Harry Houdini. The drama, from David Ticher (The Librarian) and David Shore and David Hoselton (House), is titled Houdini and Doyle and will feature the duo grudgingly joining forces to investigate crimes with a supernatural slant.

THEATER

One of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films, Notorious, is being adapted by the Gothenburg Opera of Sweden's resident composer Hans Gefors, along with librettist Kerstin Perskiwill. The spy thriller opera will hit the stage in September through November of this year.

A new tour of the musical Bullets Over Broadway will launch in August. Based on the Woody Allen film, the musical centers on an aspiring playwright who finds out his play is getting the Broadway treatment thanks to a wealthy gangster who's taken a sudden interest in producing—with the caveat his dimwitted moll has to star in one of the leading roles.