It’s the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN
Fox Searchlight has signed a deal with producer Damian Jones to develop several movie projects, including a thriller and a murder mystery. The thriller is a remake of Julia Roberts’s 1991 hit, Sleeping With The Enemy, about a woman trying to escape her abusive husband. The project is an untitled murder mystery film by Flaked co-creator Mark Chappell, although no further details were released.
Christian Gudegast and JP Davis have closed a deal to co-write Mafia X for Thunder Road Pictures and Pioneer Pictures, with Gudegast serving as director. Mafia X is described as a high-concept action thriller inspired by the true stories of organized crime groups banding together to fight terrorism.
Saban Films has picked up domestic rights to Richard Bates Jr.’s horror thriller, Tone-Deaf, which stars Terminator 2’s Robert Patrick and Silicon Valley’s Amanda Crew. Tone-Deaf follows millennial Olive (Crew) who leaves the city for a weekend of peace in the country, only to discover the shockingly dark underbelly of rural America. She rents an eccentric, ornate country house from Harvey (Patrick), an old-fashioned widower who’s struggling to hide his psychopathic tendencies — and the two collide.
Indie distributor Roadside Attractions has acquired U.S. rights to Edward Zwick’s true-crime drama, Trial by Fire, adapted by Geoffrey Fletcher and based on David Grann’s article in The New Yorker. The project stars Laura Dern and Jack O’Connell and centers on the unlikely bond between a death row inmate (O’Connell) and a mother of two from Houston (Dern) who, though facing staggering odds, fights for his freedom.
NEON has taken U.S. rights to this year’s Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner, Clemency, from filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu. The film stars Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard as prison warden Bernadine Williams, who after years of carrying out death row executions, comes up against one inmate who forces her to confront the psychological and emotional demons her job has created.
Warner Bros. has acquired worldwide distribution rights to Reminiscence, the action thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson and directed by Lisa Joy (Westworld), who also wrote the script. The project is set in a near-future Miami flooded by rising seas and follows one man’s journey to find the woman he loves after her mysterious disappearance—delving through the dark world of the past to uncover the truth about the woman he fell for.
Ray Liotta is in talks to join The Many Saints Of Newark, The Sopranos prequel film that has already lined up Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Jon Bernthal, Billy Magnussen, Corey Stoll, and Michael Gandolfini (who will play the Tony Soprano role originated by his late father James Gandolfini). Scripted by The Sopranos creator David Chase and Lawrence Konner, the prequel is set in the era of the Newark riots in the ’60s, at a time when African Americans and Italian Americans in the city were at each other’s throats.
Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek is in final negotiations to play the villain opposite Daniel Craig in writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Bond 25. There aren’t many character details available, though the villain has been rumored to be a blind man. Deadline also reported that fellow Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o is being courted to join the film as the latest “Bond girl.”
Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, and Lily-Rose Depp have been set to join Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, and Evangeline Lilly in Dreamland, Nicholas Jarecki’s dramatic thriller revolving around the opioid crisis. The film follows three colliding stories: a drug trafficker (Hammer) arranges a multi-cartel Fentanyl smuggling operation between Canada and the U.S.; an architect (Lilly) recovering from an OxyContin addiction tracks down the truth behind her son’s involvement with narcotics; and a university professor (Oldman) who battles unexpected revelations about his employer, a drug company with deep government influence bringing a new “non-addictive” painkiller to market.
A trailer was released for the thriller, A Dark Place, featuring Andrew Scott (Sherlock), Bronagh Waugh (The Fall), and Denise Gough (Colette). Scott stars a local sanitation truck driver in a sleepy backwoods town who plays detective when a local boy goes missing.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Harriet Tyce’s psychological thriller, Blood Orange, has been picked up by World Productions (the producer responsible for Bodyguard) to develop into a TV series. The project centers on a young lawyer as she takes on her first murder case, and her life starts spiraling out of control.
Tony winner Nathan Lane will play a lead role opposite Daniel Zovatto and Natalie Dormer in Showtime’s upcoming series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, a follow-up to Penny Dreadful from the original show's creator, writer and executive producer, John Logan. The next chapter moves from Victorian London to 1938 Los Angeles where a grisly murder shocks the city, leading Detective Tiago Vega (Zovatto) into an epic story that reflects the rich history of Los Angeles: from the building of the city’s first freeways and its deep traditions of Mexican-American folklore, to the dangerous espionage actions of the Third Reich and the rise of radio evangelism.
Jimmy Smits has been tapped as the male lead in NBC’s legal drama pilot Bluff City Law, a character-driven legal drama that follows the lawyers of an elite Memphis firm that specializes in the most controversial landmark civil rights cases. Led by legendary lawyer Elijah Strait (Smits) and his brilliant daughter, Sydney Keller (Caitlin McGee), they take on the toughest David-and-Goliath cases while navigating their complicated relationship. Barry Sloane (Six) and Michael Luwoye (Hamilton) have also been added to the cast.
Adelaide Clemens (Rectify) is set for a lead role opposite Edie Falco and Michael Chernus in the CBS drama pilot, Tommy, from the Bull team of co-creator Paul Attanasio and producer Amblin TV. Tommy stars Falco as the title character, a former high-ranking NYPD officer who becomes the first female chief of police for Los Angeles and uses her unflinching honesty and hardball tactics to navigate the social, political and national-security issues that converge with enforcing the law. Clemens will play Blake, the Press Secretary for the chief of police.
Avengers co-star Cobie Smulders is returning to network television as the lead of Stumptown, ABC’s drama pilot that's inspired by the graphic novels published by Oni Press. It follows Dex Parios (Smulders), a strong, assertive, and unapologetically sharp-witted Army veteran working as a P.I. in Portland, OR. With a complicated personal history and only herself to rely on, she solves other people’s messes with a blind eye toward her own.
Eve Harlow (Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.) is set as a series regular in Fox’s AI thriller drama pilot, neXT, described as a propulsive, fact-based thriller grounded in the latest A.I. research. It features a brilliant but paranoid former tech CEO who joins a Homeland Cybersecurity Agent and her team to stop the world’s first artificial intelligence crisis: the emergence of a rogue AI with the ability to continuously improve itself. Harlow will play Gina, a bit of a nerd who works in the FBI cybercrime division.
Chloe Wepper (Good Trouble), David Alpay (The Lottery), and Brooke Smith (The Good Doctor) are set as series regulars in NBC’s Prism pilot. Written by Daniel Barnz, who also directs, Prism is inspired by Rashomon, the 1950 Japanese period psychological thriller directed by Akira Kurosawa.
How I Met Your Mother’s Josh Radnor has been cast opposite Al Pacino, Logan Lerman, and Jerrika Hinton in The Hunt, Amazon’s vengeance-driven Nazi-hunting series executive produced by Oscar-winning Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele. Radnor will play Lonny Flash, a movie star who’s secretly a member of Meyer’s (Pacino) organization, a diverse band of neo-Nazi hunters living in 1977 New York City.
Child actress Alexa Skye Swinton (Billions) has landed the young lead opposite Allison Tolman in Emergence, a new NBC mystery drama pilot. The character-driven genre thriller centers on Jo (Tolman), a police chief who takes in a young child, Piper (Swinton), she finds near the site of a mysterious accident. The investigation draws her into a conspiracy larger than she ever imagined, and the child’s identity is at the center of it all.
NBC has renewed all three of its Chicago-set drama series from Dick Wolf: Chicago Fire (for Season 8), Chicago P.D. (Season 7) and Chicago Med (Season 5). The network noted that the Windy City trio is delivering their most-watched season ever, per Nielsen.
The ITV series Endeavour has been renewed for a seventh season.The show depicts the early career of the young Endeavour Morse, played by Shaun Evans, along with his mentor DI Fred Thursday of the Oxford City Police, played by Roger Allam. Both series (Endeavour and Inspector Morse) are based on the novels by Colin Dexter.
British detective Agatha Raisin is returning to Acorn TV after the streaming service ordered a third season of the drama based on MC Beaton’s novels. Ashley Jensen stars as a London PR whizz turned amateur sleuth, who becomes entangled in mischief, mayhem, and murder when she opts for early retirement in a small village in the Cotswolds.
Oxygen has set an April 7 premiere date for Murder For Hire, the latest true crime series from Dick Wolf. The program gives an exclusive look into the dark world of contract killings, showcasing some of the most fascinating murder for hire cases.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Unpause Your Life host Dr. Cali Estes welcomed Phil Chalmers, an American true crime writer and homicide consultant who has appeared on the shows Killer Kids on A&E and Crime Watch Daily on Fox. He is the author of several books including the landmark book on teen violence, Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer.
Point Blank: Hardboiled, Noir, & Detective Fiction reviewed some of the latest in crime dramas and books, including A Walk Among The Tombstones by Lawrence Block.
The newest episode of Michael Connelly's true-crime Murder Book podcast featured part 4 in the series profiling the case of Jade Clark’s murder in 1987. The killer, Pierre Romain, thought he could game the system and get off, but LAPD Detective Rick Jackson, prosecutor John Lewin, the so-called king of cold cases, and Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler had other ideas.
The latest monthly Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine podcast featured a reading of "English 398: Fiction Workshop” by Art Taylor, who is currently nominated for both the MWA’s Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Malice Domestic Convention’s Agatha Award for best short story.
Beyond the Cover’s special guest was Steve Berry, chatting about his Cotton Malone series involving the Knights of Malta, papal conclave, and lost documents that could change history.
Debbi Mack interviewed crime author and screenwriter James Longmore on the Crime Cafe podcast.
Writer Types welcomed three authors this week: Samuel Gailey, back after 5 years with his new novel, The Guilt We Carry; Jessica Barry, with her debut thriller novel, Freefall; and Angel Luis Colon, who has his first full length novel out, Hell Chose Me.
In the latest Read or Dead podcast, hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham talked about the history of mysteries and thrillers and espionage novels.
The Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by Det. Adam Richardson, profiled the new Authors of Mass Destruction podcast, hosted by Natasha Bajema; and Adam answered questions about which agency would take the lead on arresting a federal agent, and about the different uniforms and insignias police departments use to identify rank.
THEATER
The UK's Norwich Theatre Royal is staging a production of crime author and playwright Peter James’s The House On Cold Hill, starting March 11 with a run through the 16th. When the Harcourt family move into the house of their dreams, that dream home quickly turns into the stuff of nightmares as they begin to wonder whether they may not be the only residents at Cold Hill.
GAMES
Mystery Tribune compiled a 2019 list of best crime, mystery, and thriller games for Xbox One, including old and new titles such as now classic Grand Theft Auto and Mafia, as well as new releases such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Just Cause 4.
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