Welcome to another Monday and another roundup of the latest in crime drama news:
MOVIES
Amy Pascal and Neal H. Moritz have teamed up to acquire film rights to Long Bright River, the upcoming suspense novel from Liz Moore that just sold at auction to Penguin Random House imprint Riverhead Books for seven figures. Moore is also set to adapt the book, which is set in her native Philadelphia and revolves around two sisters — one, an addict who has gone missing and the other a police officer who must find her.
Sophia Lillis, last seen as Beverly Marsh in Warner Bros’ blockbuster picture It, has been tapped as the title character in the studios’ Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase film adaptation, based on the popular Nancy Drew books. Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Kleeman, and Chip Diggins are on board to produce the project, which is expected to begin filming soon. Warner Brothers made a film adaptation of this book in 1939 directed by William Clemens and starring Bonita Granville, who had toplined the previous Nancy Drew films.
Jake Gyllenhaal will produce and star in the film adaptation of To Die in Vienna, based on the Kevin Wignall novel set to be published in June by Amazon Publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer. Gyllenhaal will play Freddie Makin, a man who is hired to place Jiang Cheng, a Chinese academic, under constant surveillance. When Freddie returns home early one day, he interrupts a break-in at his apartment. The intruder escapes but then comes back to get his revenge, and Freddie becomes a hunted man. When Jiang Cheng mysteriously disappears, Freddie realizes the CIA may be involved, and his only hope is that nobody discovers the past he has been hiding for so long.
MGM has just closed a deal for James Gray to direct I Am Pilgrim, an adaptation of the espionage novel trilogy by Terry Hayes. Pilgrim is the code name for a man who doesn’t exist and refers to the adopted son of a wealthy American family who once headed a secret U.S. espionage unit. Now in anonymous retirement, he is called upon to lend his expertise to an unusual investigation but ultimately is caught in a race against time to save America from oblivion.
IFC Midnight is acquiring U.S. rights to What Keeps You Alive, the Colin Minihan-directed thriller that stars Hannah Emily Anderson and Brittany Allen as a same-sex couple pitted against one another on their one-year anniversary.
Denzel Washington is back in the first trailer for Sony Pictures’ The Equalizer 2. In the trailer, intelligence officer Robert McCall helps people and seeks justice for those who are committing crimes, starting with a Turkish mob that has kidnapped a young American girl. But when it involves someone he loves, he must see how far he will go. The Equalizer 2 hits theaters on July 20.
Old Man & The Gun has been slated for a fall release date by Fox Searchlight. The ensemble heist thriller led by Robert Redford and written and directed by David Lowery also stars Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, and Tika Sumpter. The film is based on a David Grann short story in The New Yorker that was inspired by the true story of Forrest Tucker (Redford), who escaped from San Quentin at the age of 70, and the unprecedented string of heists that perplexed law enforcement and enamored the public. Pursuing Tucker was detective John Hunt (Affleck). Spacek plays the love interest of Tucker.
A new clip was released from Mitzi Peirone’s thriller Braid starring Handmaid’s Tale actress Madeline Brewer as a woman named Daphne who reunites with her childhood friends who have since become drug dealers. As she hosts her friends (played by Imogen Waterhouse and Sarah Hay), they begin to play a game, but it soon becomes clear Daphne is in a disturbed mental state, and the game make-believe turns into a twisted, demented maze of hallucinations, role play, torture … and murder.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Amazon Studios has given a nine-episode series order to a U.S. adaptation of Utopia, written by Gone Girl author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, with Flynn also serving as executive producer and showrunner. It will be the first project under an overall TV deal she has signed with Amazon Studios. Utopia follows a group of young adults who meet online that are mercilessly hunted by a shadowy deep state organization after they come into possession of a near-mythical cult underground graphic novel. Within the comic’s pages, they discover the conspiracy theories that may actually be real and are forced into the dangerous, unique and ironic position of saving the world.
Netflix has preemptively acquired film rights to Tell Me Everything, an upcoming thriller novel from Cambria Brockman. Michael Sugar’s company Sugar23 brought in the project and will produce the adaptation with Anonymous Content and Aevitas Creative Management. Brockman’s debut novel, which Ballantine recently acquired at auction for a June 2019 street date, is set at an elite college in small-town New England and follows the shifting alliances and romantic entanglements of six tight-knit students — until one of them is murdered.
Netflix is not moving forward with a second season of the crime drama Seven Seconds, created and executive produced by The Killing's Veena Sud. Written by Sud and starring Regina King, Seven Seconds chronicles tensions running high between African-American citizens and Caucasian police in Jersey City, where a teenage African-American boy is critically injured by a cop.
Among the new shows Netflix is picking up are an untitled docuseries based on one of the biggest cold cases in French history, the murder of Grégory Villemin in 1984; The Staircase, the compelling story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed; and 13 Novembre: Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, a three-part documentary exploring the human stories behind the Parisian terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015, which will launch on the service on June 1, 2018.
Netflix had previously announced Sacha Baron Cohen would topline the six-episode limited series The Spy, and this past week, the company announced that The Americans standout Noah Emmerich has signed on to star opposite Cohen. Written and directed by Gideon Raff, creator of the Israeli drama Prisoners of War on which Showtime’s Homeland was based, The Spy tells the story of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen (Baron Cohen). Eli Cohen lived in Damascus undercover in the beginning of the ’60s, spying for Israel and managed to embed himself into Syrian high society until he was uncovered by the Syrian regime, sentenced to death, and publicly hanged.
Cinemax has given a straight-to-series order to the drama Jett, from Snakes on a Plane and Gothika scribe Sebastian Gutierrez, with Carla Gugino attached to star and executive produce. Written by Gutierrez, The story centers around world-class thief Daisy "Jett" Kowalski (Carla Gugino), fresh out of prison, who's forced back into doing what she does best by dangerous and eccentric criminals determined to exploit her skills for their own ends.
Dane DeHaan is set to star in Sky's brand-new crime thriller ZeroZeroZero. The upcoming series, based on a novel by Roberto Saviano, follows a number of power-hungry criminals and the product that links them all: cocaine. Joining DeHaan in the new eight-episode drama are Andrea Riseborough (The Death of Stalin), Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspect), and The Missing's Tchéky Karyo.
CBS has renewed eleven returning series for 2018-2019, including its entire Friday lineup of dramas, MacGyver, Hawaii Five-O, and Blue Bloods, along with Bull, NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Los Angeles, and Madam Secretary, They join previously announced renewals of NCIS, SEAL Team, and S.W.A.T., among other non-crime dramas. Veteran drama Criminal Minds and the techno-thriller series Scorpion are both still on the "bubble."
NBC has pulled the action drama Taken off the schedule, effective immediately. The series — a prequel to Luc Besson’s hit movie franchise — was retooled heading into Season 2 with a new showrunner and a casting shakeup. The story follows the origins of younger, hungrier former Green Beret Bryan Mills (Clive Standen) as he deals with a personal tragedy that shakes his world. As Mills fights to overcome the trauma of the incident and exact revenge, he is pulled into a career as a deadly CIA operative, a job that awakens his very particular, and very dangerous, set of skills. In 30 years, this character is destined to become the Bryan Mills in the Taken films starring Liam Neeson.
Michael C Hall, best known for playing the forensic technician/serial killer on Showtime’s Dexter, is running around the British countryside looking for his daughter in the first trailer for Netflix’s forthcoming crime thriller Safe. Hall stars alongside Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington in the eight-part drama that centers on Tom, a pediatric surgeon who is raising his two teenage daughters in a picturesque gated community after the death of his wife. Everyone seems to be recovering and thriving, until one evening, one daughter sneaks out to a party. A murder and a disappearance ensue, bringing buried secrets to the surface. Harlan Coben exec produces alongside Hall, Nicola Shindler, Danny Brocklehurst, and Richard Fee. The series launches May 10.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
The Crime Friction podcast welcomed Art Taylor, whose latest stories can be read in Down & Out The Magazine and Black Cat Mystery Magazine. Taylor has won four Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, two Macavity Awards, and three consecutive Derringer Awards for his short fiction, and his work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories
Meet the Thriller Author host Alan Petersen welcomed Thomas Greanias, a New York Times bestselling novelist and one of the world’s leading authors of adventure. His books in print have been translated into multiple languages and sold in 200 nations around the globe. A former journalist and on-air correspondent for NBC, Greanias infuses his international thrillers with provocative issues ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.
In the latest edition of Crime Cafe, host Debbi Mack interviewed crime fiction author David Swinson about his writing and series with Frank Marr, a retired D.C. police detective working as a private eye for a defense attorney.
THEATER
The world premiere of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Curtain appears at the Theatre Royal Bath from Wednesday, April 25 to Saturday, May 5. In this production from award-winning dramatist Simon Read (who wrote the play on a commission from the Theatre), Robert Powell stars as Holmes, who lives in retirement on the South Coast. All too aware that he’s older and slower, he’s concerned that he might have lost his touch, paranoid that he is an easy target for his enemies. So when Mary Watson (wife of his former associate Dr. John Watson and played by Liza Goddard) tracks him down to tell him she has seen her long-dead son through the window of 221B Baker Street, apparently alive and well, Holmes is determined to solve the mystery and confront his own demons at the same time.
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