MOVIES
First Look Media, one of the financiers behind last year’s Best Picture winner Spotlight, is spearheading We Do Not Forget, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zachary Quinto and directed by Zach Helm. The project is a fictionalized account of a real battle between the "hacktivist" organization Anonymous and the Mexican drug cartel known as Los Zetas.
Director Jeff Nichols signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to write and direct a new big-screen version of Alien Nation. The original film followed a racist cop (James Caan) forced to team with a member (Mandy Patinkin) of an alien race that came to Earth after a ship carrying enslaved aliens crashed, with the newcomers assimilated in Los Angeles. It also spawned a TV series that lasted one season from 1989-90.
Two days after acquiring Sean Penn’s The Last Face, Saban Films picked up U.S. distribution rights to Jonathan Mostow’s The Hunter’s Prayer, based on the critically acclaimed Kevin Wignall novel and starring Sam Worthington and newcomer Odeya Rush. The action thriller follows a solitary assassin (Worthington) hired to kill a young woman (Rush) who is unaware her family’s questionable business dealings have cost them their lives. However, when he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger, the two form a bond and escape across Europe together, hunted by those responsible for her family’s murder.
British actor Tom Bateman is in negotiations to join Fox's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh. The classic Christie story centers on special detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh), who boards a train from Jerusalem to Europe only to have a murder committed in the car next to his during a snowstorm. Bateman will play Bouc, Poirot's companion and sidekick, who works at the train company that runs the Orient Express.
After playing gangster Whitey Bulger in last year’s Black Mass, Johnny Depp is taking on another true-life figure, this time on the opposite side of the law. Depp is attached to star in Labyrinth, playing Detective Russell Poole, the Los Angeles police detective who investigated the murders of rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Poole was a decorated detective who spent months investigating the murder of B.I.G., eventually coming to believe that " group of gangsta cops" in his own force were not only involved but were also tied to Death Row Records and the Bloods street gang.
Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly's Game has added to its cast with Michael Cera who would join previously cast Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba. The film stars Chastain as a skier whose Olympic dreams are dashed and heads to Los Angeles to become a cocktail waitress but rises through the social circuit to organize underground poker games for the Hollywood elite. Cera will play Player X, an elite celebrity player who develops an interesting relationship with Chastain’s character. The film is based on the real-life skier Molly Bloom and is adapted from her book Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker.
Jason Mitchell, who starred as late rapper Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton, has joined Kathryn Bigelow's untitled drama about the 1967 Detroit riots. The film is currently in production and also features John Boyega, Will Poulter, Jacob Latimore, Algee Smith, Ben O’Toole, Jack Reynor, Kaitlyn Dever and Hannah Murray.
It must be nice to be loved: Despite recent speculation about who might replace Daniel Craig as James Bond, Sony has reportedly offered the actor $150m for two more Bond films. Craig has already starred in four Bonds, and despite seeming skeptical about returning for more installments, has also said he reserved “the right to change my mind” about quitting the series.
Scooby-Doo and the gang have been solving mysteries on television since the late 1960s, but two live action movies didn't fare so well. Now the show is being resurrected as a fully-animated film with actor/comedian Dax Shepard said to be in talks to direct the project.
A new poster and photos were released for the suspense thriller Nocturnal Animals, based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. Starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, the film centers around an art gallery owner haunted by her ex-husband’s novel, a violent thriller she interprets as a veiled threat and a symbolic revenge tale.
TELEVISION
The Creative Arts Emmys announced this weekend included an armful of awards for Netflix's nonfiction serial Making of a Murderer. Hank Azaria also picked up another Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series due to his performance in an episode of Ray Donovan, and the award for Outstanding Casting for a Limited Series, Movie, or Special went to The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. You can check out all the winners via this link.
Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan has signed on to write and executive produce Raven, a limited series for HBO about Jim Jones, the infamous leader of the Peoples Temple cult who led his followers to a mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. This is the second Jim Jones/Peoples Temple show in the works after A&E's previously-announced anthology series in development focused on American cults (with the first episode centered on Jones).
Filming has begun on season seven of Game of Thrones, and according to the German site Bild, another esteemed British actor may feature in the HBO show: Angela Lansbury. Perhaps best known for her role in Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury is said to be filming a minor cameo role that will feature across two of the season’s seven episodes. HBO has yet to confirm whether Lansbury has a role in the show.
CBS has bought an hourlong legal drama from True Jack Productions to be written by TV writer/playwright Annie Weisman. The series would center around two sisters on opposite sides of the political spectrum who come together to save their father’s law firm when scandal puts him behind bars.
Vin Diesel is developing a new procedural drama at NBC, currently entitled First Responders, which focuses on young veterans struggling to reintegrate into society, while saving civilian lives along the way. The team is the best search-and-rescue operation in the country, and is run by husband-and-wife duo, Doc and Lil Pierce, but the pair struggle as they have been unable to find their own son, who disappeared years earlier.
In a pre-emptive buy, NBC has given a put pilot commitment to a drama from The Family creator Jenna Bans, an untitled project that follows three good-girl mothers and wives from the suburbs of Detroit as they descend together into a life of crime.
Narcos will continue beyond Pablo Escobar. After two seasons following the Colombian kingpin's story, Netflix is moving ahead with a third and fourth season of the drug cartel drama. Exec producer Eric Newman said the show was never just about the Medellin cartel and its leader, it's "about cocaine and cocaine continues beyond Escobar."
War and Peace star Tom Burke has been hired to play Cormoran Strike in the BBC’s upcoming adaptations of JK Rowling’s adult crime novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The first in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, will be split into three one-hour-long dramas, with the adaptations of second and third books The Silkworm and Career of Evil both divided into two one-hour parts.
Camryn Manheim is joining the cast of Major Crimes in a recurring role as the deputy chief of operations at the LAPD. She'll also be one of the top contenders for the assistant chief position, after Russell Taylor (Robert Gossett) was killed in the episode "White Lies, Part 1." Executive producer James Duff also noted that in addition to Manheim's character, Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell), Fritz Howard (Jon Tenney) and another new character will be weighed as possible replacements for Taylor, and the ensuing competition will create "tension and rivalry" among their colleagues.
USA Network has given a pilot order to The Sinner, a crime thriller executive produced by and starring Jessica Biel (The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea). Created and written by Derek Simonds and based on Petra Hammesfahr’s book, the project centers around a young mother (Biel) who commits a startling and very public act of violence. The event launches an inverted and utterly surprising crime thriller whose driving force is not the who or the what – but the why. A rogue investigator finds himself obsessed with uncovering the woman’s buried motive, and together they travel a harrowing journey into the depths of her psyche and the violent secrets hidden in her past.
The 1967 Australian novel Picnic At Hanging Rock is being made into a new TV drama for Foxtel. Joan Lindsay's book followed the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their governess on Valentine’s Day in 1900 and has already had the big-screen treatment in Peter Weir’s 1975 film, which featured Jacki Weaver and Wolf Creek star John Jarratt.
Law & Order: SVU ended on a game-changer in Season 17 with the death of Special Victims Unit's own Mike Dodds. New showrunner Rick Eid has big plans for how Benson and Co. move on from Dodds' death, with Season 18 picking up a month or so after Dodd's death and the ensuing emotional fallout.
Hulu Japan has announced an original six-part drama, Daisho ("Compensation"), based on a novel of the same title by award-winning mystery writer Jun Ioka. The series focuses on the relationship of a hotshot lawyer (Shun Oguri) and a psychopathic client (Tsutomu Takahashi), a former boyhood friend who occupies a dark chapter in the lawyer’s past. The series will begin streaming this fall in both Japan and the U.S.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
The latest Crime and Science Radio podcast was titled "Crime Scenes, Criminalistics, and the Cutting Edge in Los Angeles: An Interview with Former LASD Criminalist Professor Donald Johnson of California State University, Los Angeles."
2nd Sunday Crime with host Libby Hellmann welcomed James Ziskin, the author of the Ellie Stone Mysteries, nominated for Anthony, Barry, and Lefty Awards.
Crime Cafe featured author Terry Ambrose chatting with author/screenwriter Debbi Mack about his Wilson McKenna mysteries set in Hawaii.
NY Times Bestseller Aleatha Romig joined Alex Dolan on Thrill Seekers to talk about her new "The Light" series.
THEATER
City of Glass, Paul Auster’s meta-detective novel about a thriller writer who finds himself playing sleuth, will be staged in Manchester and London next year in a new hi-tech adaptation. The play will land in Manchester March 4-18, 2017 and then at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, from April 20 to May 13, followed by an international tour.
Peninsula Players Theater opens the run of its final show of its 81st season on September 7 with the wildly comic adventure The 39 Steps, first published by John Buchan in 1915 and followed by various movie adaptations including Hitchcock's 1939 thriller.
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