It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Veteran producers Bruce Hendricks and Galen Walker have optioned the rights to the late Stanley Kubrick’s unmade film, Lunatic At Large, and have plans to bring the film-noir storyline to the big screen. The project was one of three film stories found in Kubrick’s archives after his death. Production is expected to start this fall.
Several studios got into a bidding war over a flight attendant's first novel. According to the flight attendant, T.J. Newman, she wrote the thriller, Falling, on the backs of airplane napkins and on iPads during her red-eye route. The story follows 140-plus passengers on a crowded flight from New York to LA who don’t yet know that a half-hour before takeoff, their pilot’s family was kidnapped. Now, in order for his family to live, the pilot must follow orders and crash the plane. While much of the story takes place in the air, there is also said to be a relentless FBI agent trying to save the family on the ground. Falling is already being described as "Speed at 35,000 feet."
Paul A. Kaufman is set to adapt the screenplay and direct Nicole Trope’s novel, The Boy in the Photo. The story is a gripping psychological thriller which centers on Megan, whose life was turned upside down when her ex-husband kidnapped their six year old son, Daniel. Six years later, a twelve-year-old boy shows up claiming to be Megan’s missing child, following his father being killed in a deadly fire. As Megan tries to bond with Daniel, he is not the sweet little boy that she lost. Instead, he’s terse, erratic, condescending and dangerous. Fear strikes as she struggles with strange things happening around her while she begins to doubt Daniel is her real son. As Daniel holds a very dark secret and things escalate, can Megan find out the truth and save herself?
Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs Kong) has been hired to direct a reboot of John Woo’s 1997 action hit, Face/Off. The original Face/Off starred John Travolta as Sean Archer, a federal agent bent on revenge after terrorist, Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage), killed his son. After another incident puts Troy in a coma, Archer agrees to a bizarre plan that involves using experimental surgery to give him Troy’s body, face, and voice, and then going to a max security prison to convince Troy’s partners to reveal the location of a bomb.
Sandra Bullock is the latest star to come aboard Sony Pictures’s action thriller, Bullet Train. She joins an ensemble cast jam-packed with stars, including Brad Pitt, Joey King, Lady Gaga, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Logan Lerman, Bad Bunny, Andrew Koji, Brian Tyree Henry, Masi Oka, Michael Shannon, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Karen Fukuhara. The details of Bullock’s role in the film are currently unknown. Based on the novel, Maria Beetle, by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train follows five assassins who find themselves on a bullet train in Japan and realize that their assignments are related. David Leitch (John Wick) is set to helm the film from a screenplay by Zak Olkewicz.
Lily Gladstone is set to star in Apple Original Films’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro also are attached to star in the pic, with Martin Scorsese directing. Based on David Grann’s praised best-seller and set in 1920s Oklahoma, Killers of the Flower Moon depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. Gladstone will play Mollie Burkhart, an Osage married to Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), who is nephew of a powerful local rancher (De Niro).
The James Bond film, Die Another Day, introduced Halle Berry’s Giacinta Johnson as a Bond woman who would help save the day in Pierce Brosnan’s final film as the superspy. A spin-off was being developed for her character, better known to her friends/foes as Jinx, and while it never happened, the scrapped script for the film has apparently made its way online.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
FX has picked up a pilot for a series adaptation of Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The 1969 novel tells the fictional story of the first Black CIA officer hired by the agency in the late 1960s. It was previously adapted for the screen in 1973, with Lawrence Cook starring as the novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman.
True Lies, a TV series adaptation of James Cameron’s hit 1994 action comedy movie, has taken a major step toward becoming a reality. CBS has given a pilot order to the project, which is from the team of Cameron, the director McG, and Burn Notice creator Matt Nix. Shocked to discover that her bland and unremarkable computer consultant husband is a skilled international spy, an unfulfilled suburban housewife is propelled into a life of danger and adventure when she’s recruited to work alongside him to save the world as they try to revitalize their passionless marriage.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover are rebooting the feature film Mr. & Mrs. Smith as a television series for Amazon. The pair revealed via Instagram stories that they were working on the project for 2022. The 2005 feature film starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a married couple who were rival spies.
James Graham, writer of the Emmy-nominated, Brexit: The Uncivil War, has created a crime drama titled Sherwood for the BBC. Inspired in part by real events, the six-part series is set in the Nottinghamshire mining village where Graham grew up. The contemporary series sees two murders shatter an already fractured community leading to one of the largest manhunts in British history. Suspicion is rife and the tragic murders threaten to inflame historic divisions sparked during the miners’ strike that tore families apart three decades before.
Guy Pearce will reunite with his Mildred Pierce co-star, Kate Winslet, for another upcoming HBO miniseries, Mare of Easttown. Pearce will co-star alongside Winslet, who plays Mare Sheehan, a small-town Pennsylvania detective whose life crumbles around her as she investigates a local murder.
Carla Gugino, who recently starred in The Haunting of Bly Manor, will front Leopard Skin, a television crime thriller for AGC Television. The cast also includes Amelia Eve, Gentry White, Philip Winchester, Margot Bingham, Gaite Jansen, Nora Arnezeder, and Ana de la Reguera. Leopard Skin kicks off when a criminal gang fleeing a botched jewelry heist is forced to hide out in a beachside estate where two women live in seclusion. Their world turns into a tension filled hothouse of secrets, betrayal and desire — all of which will come to the surface as the gang awaits their fate.
HBO Max has opted not to proceed with Red Bird Lane, its drama pilot starring Susan Sarandon. Written by Sara Gran and directed by David Slade, the project is a psychological thriller that follows eight strangers who arrive at an isolated house, all for different reasons. Upon their mysterious and coincidental arrival, the strangers realize that something sinister and terrifying awaits them.
Paula Newsome, Matt Lauria, and Mel Rodriguez have been cast as leads in CSI: Vegas, which is nearing a formal straight-to-series order at CBS. William Petersen and Jorja Fox are finalizing their deals to star in the project, which serves as a sequel to the mothership series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (reprising their roles as Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, respectively). While billed as an event series, reports indicate it could become an ongoing series running for multiple seasons. CSI: Vegas opens a new chapter in Las Vegas, the city where it all began. Facing an existential threat that could bring down the Crime Lab, a brilliant team of forensic investigators must welcome back old friends and deploy new techniques to preserve and serve justice in Sin City.
This isn't exactly a live-action crime drama per se, but it's an interesting move on Fox's part: the network is developing an animated series based on the iconic board game, Clue. Clue is conceptualized on the murder of Mr. Boddy, the host of the game’s "dinner party," during which players must untangle various clues to determine who among the party’s six guests — Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlett, Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green and Dr. Orchid — committed the crime. Clue was also being rebooted for the big screen with Ryan Reynolds attached to star and executive produce, although there hasn't been much of a progress report on that project lately.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
The latest Mystery Rats Maze podcast features an excerpt from Leave It to Cleaver by Victoria Hamilton, as read by actor Ariel Linn.
Read or Dead discussed reads that feature true crime and social justice, honoring Black History Month.
Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Paul Vidich to chat about his fourth novel, The Mercenary.
Joseph Reid stopped by Wrong Place, Write Crime to discuss his latest Seth Walker thriller, Departure.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club spoke with Mark Aldridge, a senior lecturer at Solent University, Southampton, about his new nonfiction book, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World.
The featured guest on Queer Writers of Color was Steve Neil Johnson, the author of the bestselling Doug Orlando mysteries.
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