Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Benedict Cumberbatch is set to star in and produce a film adaptation of Rogue Male, the 1939 English novel by Geoffrey Household. The story follows a hunter who attempts to assassinate a dictator (Household has said the dictator was intended to be a stand-in for Adolph Hitler) but is caught, tortured and left for dead; when he escapes back home to England, he must hide out in a harsh countryside with enemy agents and police in hot pursuit.

Angelina Jolie has departed Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express. She was reported as being in negotiations to join the cast but the studio will now turn to other big names to fill the void, with Charlize Theron among those in consideration. Branagh will star as Detective Hercule Poirot in addition to directing the adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel that has a script from Michael Green.

Jessica Chastain has joined the cast of Ubisoft's film adaptation of the Tom Clancy video game The Division. Released on March 8 this year, the game was an instant success, with the highest number of first-day sales on record for the gaming company. The Division takes place in the aftermath of a small pox pandemic in dystopian New York. Players attempt to rebuild, investigate and fight crime in the city.

Sony Pictures and Misher Films are moving forward with a remake of director Gerardo Naranjo's 2011 Mexican crime drama Miss Bala, with Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer adapting the screenplay from the original script by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz. The story is loosely based on a real incident and stars Stephanie Sigman as a young woman who dreams of becoming a beauty queen, but when she witnesses a gang hit in a nightclub, the mob rigs an upcoming pageant and she’s dragged into the world of drug cartels and corrupt cops.

Mark Wahlberg is attached to star in and produce the thriller Home Invasion, re-teaming the actor with Contraband scribe Aaron Guzikowski. Pitched as "Panic Room meets Die Hard," Wahlberg will play a contractor whose artist wife suffers from an illness that prevents her from being in the sunlight and builds a futuristic house for her that blocks out any natural light. When a band of criminals attempts to break into the house to steal one of his wife’s valuable sculptures, he must evade and outsmart them to protect his home.

Mr. Robot star Rami Malek is in talks to join the remake of Papillon alongside Charlie Hunnam. Malek would play Louis Dega, the role made famous by Dustin Hoffman in the 1973 original, with Hunnam taking on Steve McQueen's role of Henri Charrière. The remake will be a modern take on the original film, which was based on the memoirs of a convicted felon (Charrière) who escaped from Devil's Island, a South American settlement for exiled prisoners, aided by Malek's character (Dega), a counterfeiter.

Joel Edgerton is in early talks to join Jennifer Lawrence in the adaptation of the Jason Matthews spy novel Red Sparrow, with Francis Lawrence attached to direct the script by American Hustle scribe Eric Warren Singer. The book is set in contemporary Russia where state intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the cast-iron bureaucracy of post-Soviet intelligence. Drafted against her will to become a "Sparrow," a trained seductress in the service, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a first-tour CIA officer who handles the agency’s most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence.

Linda Cardellini (Bloodline) has been cast in the action thriller Hunter Killer, an adaptation by Peter Craig and Jamie Moss of the novel Firing Point by George Wallace and Don Keith. The story revolves around an American submarine commander (Gerard Butler) sent into Russian waters to save the Russian president (Gary Oldman) in the midst of a military coup. Cardellini will play Jane Norquist, a NSA senior analyst and Russia expert. Toby Stephens, Billy Bob Thornton, Common, Ryan McPartlin and Gabriel Chavarria will also co-star.

Don Johnson is in talks to join Vince Vaughn in the indie action thriller Brawl in Cell Block 99 from S. Craig Zahler, the writer and director of the critically acclaimed 2015 cannibal Western Bone Tomahawk. Vaughn plays Bradley, a former boxer who goes to work for an old friend as a drug courier who winds up in prison and is forced to commit brutal, violent acts. Johnson would play the role of the prison warden in the film, which is set to start production next month in New York City.

Vancouver's Cinematheque is offering its annual summer celebration of the "giddy, gloomy, seductive glories of Film Noir" through August 22. Highlights include The Big Sleep, based on the Chandler novel and starring Bogart and Bacall, and Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock's favorite of his own movies.

TELEVISION

The Closer star Kyra Sedgwick is returning to primetime as the star of another series, ABC's thriller Ten Days In the Valley, with a deal for a 10-episode straight-to-series order. The project comes from Tassie Cameron, co-creator and head writer of hit cop series Rookie Blue, and follows Jane Sadler (Sedgwick), an overworked television producer and single mother in the throes of a fractious separation whose young daughter goes missing in the middle of the night.

James Norton (Grantchester, War & Peace, Happy Valley) has been cast as the lead in BBC One's upcoming event series McMafia, inspired by Misha Glenny's bestselling book. The project is a hard-hitting look at global crime and its far reaching influence and is being spearheaded by Hossein Amini (Drive) and James Watkins (The Woman In Black), who will also direct.

Investigation Discovery is joining forces with bestselling author James Patterson, who will write and executive produce a six-part scripted true crime series for the network based on Patterson’s new line of novella-length BookShots.

Invesitgation Discovery also greenlighted the drama special Black and Blue, with investigative reporting from Emmy-winning journalist Tony Harris. He will travel the country to reveal how police shootings impact African American families in their homes and communities across the U.S., while also giving viewers a first-hand look into what it’s like to be a law enforcement officer working to protect our not-so-united municipalities in these troubling times.

L.A. Law, which ran on NBC for eight seasons starting in 1986, may get a new life through a reboot according to series creator Steven Bochco. The new project is in the works with 20th Century Fox Television, which owns the franchise, but it is in the very early stages of development. Bochco hopes to have the pilot script ready for contention in next year's crop of new shows. Bochco also said that he wouldn't rule out bringing back some of the original cast and characters from the first iteration of L.A. Law, which included Corbin Bernsen, Jimmy Smits, Harry Hamlin, Susan Dey. and Blair Underwood.

After a mildly successful foray into dark serialized dramas like Animal Kingdom and Good Behavior, TNT announced it will gradually bring back procedurals and lighter fare such as Rizzoli & Isles. The plan is to introduce a new procedural drama on the network in late 2017 or early 2018.

USA Network has set an October premiere date for its new original crime thriller series Eyewitness from executive producer Adi Hasak (Shades of Blue). The 10-episode drama series delves into the lives of two teenage boys after they secretly meet up in a cabin, witness a shooting, and barely escape with their lives—then learn the efforts to keep their secret are worse than they'd bargained for. Adapted from the critically acclaimed Norwegian drama Øyevitne, the series stars Julianne Nicholson, Gil Bellows, Tyler Young and James Paxton.

Sleepy Hollow has found Crane’s new archenemy in Jeremy Davies (Lost, Justified). Davies' recurring character, Malcolm Dreyfuss, is described as an eccentric and outspoken tech mogul who became a billionaire before the age of 30 and has since been seeking other worlds to conquer.  

Willem Dafoe has closed a deal to voice Ryuk the Shinigami in Adam Wingard's adaptation of the popular Japanese manga Death Note that will debut next year on Netflix. Ryuk is a supernatural god of death who accompanies protagonist/anti-hero Light Turner (Nat Wolff), a high school student who comes into possession of a powerful, unholy "Death Note" that kills anyone whose name is written into it. Drunk on power, he begins to kill those he deems unworthy of life. In addition to being a supernatural horror, Death Note is also a police procedural, as Light's own father is tasked with finding the serial killer who the public believes is behind the sudden string of murders.

Director Antoine Fuqua (The Magnificent Seven, Training Day) has received a 10-episode straight-to-series order from the AT&T Audience network for a crime drama that dives deeply into the underbelly of the Los Angeles diamond trade via the members of the Green family. Production is set to begin this month and is slated for release later this year.

Dick Wolf will continue his crime-oriented franchise slate with a New York-set crime drama that focuses on the FBI. Wolf already has actively been researching the subject, meeting with FBI executives and other sources, including FBI director James Comey. Because of how full Wolf’s plate is, the new FBI drama is eyed for the 2018-19 season, with the possibility that the new show would be introduced on Wolf's Law & Order: SVU, which is also set in New York.  

Meanwhile, Wolf said he thinks there will "definitely" be a four-way crossover between his three existing Chicago shows - Fire, P.D. and Med - and new spin-off Chicago Justice next year, after the latter premieres mid-season.

Casey Bloys, HBO's new president of programming, told reporters that Nic Pizzolatto's crime drama True Detective is not dead. He added, "It’s a really valuable franchise for us. I think both seasons average about 11 million viewers an episode. So not dead. Just I’m not sure we have the right take for a third season yet."

Emmy-nominated Lili Taylor will return to American Crime for the upcoming third season, joining previously announced Timothy Hutton, Felicity Huffman, Regina King and Richard Cabral in the critically-praised anthology series from John Ridley and Michael McDonald.

There will no second season for Fox's literary adventure drama series Houdini & Doyle, which was canceled by the network after being plagued by soft ratings throughout its freshman run. The series focused on the unlikely real-life friendship between master illusionist Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan) as they grudgingly joined forces with New Scotland Yard to investigate unsolved and inexplicable crimes with a supernatural slant.

Investigation Discovery has set a three-night television event series focusing on the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation for premiere on September 12, which will reexamine the evidence in the case that gripped the nation of a 6-year-old beauty queen mysteriously murdered in her own home the day after Christmas 1996.  

Alexandra Metz has landed a recurring role in the CW's new drama series Frequency, a re-imagining of the 2000 New Line Cinema film, which centers on a female police detective who discovers she can speak via a ham radio with her estranged father (also a detective) who died in 1996. They forge a new relationship while working together on an unsolved murder case, but unintended consequences of the "butterfly effect" wrea
k havoc in the present day. Metz will play Maya, a college student desperate to prevent herself from becoming a victim of a violent crime.

Author M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin now has her own TV series, Agatha Raisin: The Quiche of Death, which premiered on Acorn TV. Ugly Betty’s Ashley Jensen stars as the London PR executive attempting to retire peacefully in a small Cotswold village, but has trouble winning the townsfolk over—not to mention the encountering of dead bodies. You can watch the trailer and the entire first episode for free on Acorn TV.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

D.P. Lyle and Jan Burke presented a Live Crime & Science Radio Podcast with special guest interviewee Criminalist and Forensics Professor Don Johnson at a MWA-LA meeting on August 7. You can listen to the archived version via this link.

Retired agent Bea DeFazio served in the FBI for 23 years, seven as a member of the Special Surveillance Group (SSG) following spies in New York and 16 as a special agent, as well as working undercover to ferret out child predators trolling in online chat rooms. She stopped by fellow retired FBI agent Jerri Williams' podcast "FBI Retired Case File Review."

THEATER

Australia's Sydney Theatre Company is currently presenting The Hanging by award-winning playwright Angela Betzien through September 10. The story follows two school girls who go missing in Melbourne’s hinterland with the only clue being the girls' closest friend and confidante. Beguiling and quick-witted, this 14-year-old ingénue (played by Ashleigh Cummings) won't give up her secrets easily - and what does her English teacher (Genevieve Lemon) have to hide?