Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Author Marcus Sakey's forthcoming novel Brilliance was picked up by Legendary Pictures, and will be produced by Joe Roth and Palak Patel, the team behind Oz the Great and Powerful. The book is set in Wyoming and centers on a group of people with rare abilities, including federal agent Nick Cooper, whose gifts make him exceptional at hunting terrorists.

Joel Kinnaman is in talks to join Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace in the film adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's Soviet-era thriller, Child 44. The project, which involves a Russian secret service office being framed by his government and forced to go on the run, will be directed by Ridley Scott.

Melbourne-based Jump Street Films has optioned New York writer Peter Cameron's novel Andorra, with the author writing the screenplay. The story follows Alexander Fox, an American who immigrates to the tiny nation of Andorra and becomes the main suspect when a dead body turns up in the harbor.

Fans of the defunct UPN-TV series Veronica Mars have raised $3.5 million in Kickstarter, enough for creator Rob Thomas and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution to fund and market the film, planned for release early next year. The original series featured Veronica moonlighting as a private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father; the plot of the film is said to be set a decade after the show's third season and have Veronica returning to Neptune, California after Logan (Jason Dohring) seeks her help in investigating the murder of his pop-star girlfriend.

Kate Beckinsale is in negotiations to star as the title character in Eliza Graves, a psychological thriller from Nu Image/Millennium. To be directed by rad Anderson, the project is loosely based on one of Edgar Allan Poe's early works, an 1845 short story titled "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." Beckinsale will play a patient at a mental institution in which the inmates have taken over and are posing as doctors

Billy Bob Thornton is in talks to join the David Dobkin film The Judge. The story follows a hot-shot lawyer (Robert Downey Jr.) who returns to his hometown after being away for decades to attend his mother's funeral, but finds his estranged father (Robert Duvall) is suspected of killing her. Thornton would play a special prosecutor brought in to try Duvall’s character.

TV

Sara Gran's book series about Claire DeWitt, a tough female private eye in post-Katrina New Orleans, is heading to the small screen. TNT is developing a TV movie based on Gran's books, with the author serving as co-executive producer and writing the hour-long script. Gran is also partnering with Guillermo Del Toro on Nuttshell Studies, a Hitchcockian drama about a 1950s small-town housewife who becomes obsessed with solving brutal crimes.

Benedict Cumberbatch confirmed that there will be a fourth season of the BBC's Sherlock. The first of the three episodes that make up the third season starts filming this week (Hat tip Omnimystery News.)

Steven Bochco's pilot for TNT, Murder in the First, has landed Taye Diggs and Kathleen Robertson in the lead roles of two San Francisco PD homicide detectives investigating different crimes that may be related.

Amber Tamblyn's first gig after her stint on House will be the female lead in the CBS drama pilot Anatomy of Violence. The project is inspired by Adrian Raine's nonfiction book and centers on on a maverick FBI Criminal Psychiatrist
(played by Skeet Ulrich) with an expertise in sociopaths who partners with Abby (Tamblyn), a
young female FBI Agent with whom he shares a conflicted past.

Rainn Wilson and Kristopher Polaha have joined Dennis Haysbert in the CBS pilot Backstrom, based on the novels of Leif G.W. Persson. The series centers on Everett Backstrom, an overweight, offensive detective as he tries, and fails, to change his self-destructive behavior. Polaha will play Sgt. Peter Niedermayer, the unit's Forensics Liaison.

James Spader has signed on as the lead in NBC's drama pilot The Blacklist. Spader will play a man called Red, the world's most wanted criminal who mysteriously turns himself in and offers to give up everyone he has ever worked with, provided he's allowed to work with newly minted FBI agent, Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone).

USA's Burn Notice is adding two regulars to the cast for the show's upcoming seventh and possibly final season. Jack Coleman (Heroes) will play a ranking CIA officer "who has seen it all," while Stephen Martines (The Closer) will play a swashbuckling bounty hunter and Fiona's (Gabrielle Anwar) charming new boyfriend. Actor Nick Tarabay will be featured in a two-episode arc playing a cold-blooded freelance operative.

Dallas Roberts (formerly of The Walking Dead) will appear in the second season of the CBS drama Unforgettable, playing Eliot, who is in charge of the Major Cases Section of the NYPD.

Christian Slater will star with Steve Zahn in the ABC drama pilot Influence, playing two brothers who head an agency that uses the science of human motivation and manipulation to solve its clients' problems.

Fans of the USA detective comedy Psych will get to vote on the ending to the show's 100th episode, which pays pay homage to the 1985 cult classic film Clue (in turn based on the whodunit board game).

As Omnimystery News reports, ABC Family has set its summer 2013 premiere dates, including: the Season Four premiere of Pretty Little Liars, based on the young adult series of books by Sara Shepard; and the premiere of Twisted, a murder mystery centered on a charismatic 16-year-old with a troubled past who reconnects with his two female best friends from childhood, but becomes the prime suspect when a fellow student is found dead in her home.