Media Murder for Monday

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

Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins, Anson Mount, and Abbie Cornish are set to star in The Virtuoso, a noir thriller directed by Nick Stagliano that will be presented to buyers at Cannes. The story follows a professional assassin (Mount) who must track down and kill his latest target to satisfy an outstanding debt to his mentor (Hopkins). Unlike his other “jobs,” he’s given no name or photo, only that his target will be in a rustic diner in a dying town at 5:00 PM. Bound by obligation, the Virtuoso embarks on a manhunt to find his prey and accomplish the mission. Any one of the patrons in the diner could be the mark, even the enigmatic waitress (Cornish) who, even if she’s not the prey, could prove to be a distraction that threatens to derail his task, and endanger his life.

Annette Bening and Michelle Pfeiffer are boarding director Gideon Raff’s thriller, Turn of Mind, a feature adaptation of Alice LaPlante's New York Times bestseller. Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright is adapting the psychological thriller, which centers on a retired orthopedic doctor (Bening) suffering from Alzheimer’s who is trying to figure out — in her moments of clarity — if she killed the person the police claim she did or if she’s being deceived.

Chris Pine has signed on to star in the thriller, Violence of Action. Tarik Saleh will direct from a script written by J.P. Davis. The story follows a man involuntarily discharged from the Marines who joins a paramilitary organization in order to support his family and travels to Poland with his elite team on a black ops mission to investigate a mysterious threat. Barely into his first assignment, he finds himself alone and hunted in Eastern Europe, where he must fight to stay alive long enough to get home and uncover the true motives of those who betrayed him.

Chris Hemsworth and Tiffany Haddish are teaming for a buddy cop comedy titled Down Under Cover. Hemsworth plays a detective who goes undercover to investigate a group of male, Australian erotic dancers who he suspects are involved in a series of casino heists. Haddish will play a lone wolf cop whom Hemsworth reluctantly accepts as a partner.

Sir Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce are teaming up for the thriller, Long Gone Heroes. Directed by Santiago Manes Moreno (Alfred Hitchcock’s Gun), the film tells the story of a special forces soldier-for-hire who must return to the field of battle with his military team to track down a female reporter entangled in a huge political scandal, while being hunted by the mercenaries’ former comrades.

Academy Award winner Russell Crowe will star in Unhinged, a psychological thriller which starts production July 15 in New Orleans. Unhinged takes an ordinary, everyday incident to its most terrifying conclusion in telling the story of a mother who leans on her horn at the wrong time, to the wrong guy (played by Crowe). “Road rage” doesn’t begin to describe what he’s about to do to her and everyone she knows.

STXinternational has locked up international rights to I Care A Lot, a thriller starring Rosamund Pike and directed by J Blakeson based on his original screenplay. Principal photography will get underway in July in Boston, with Pike playing Marla Grayson, a successful legal guardian with a knack for using the law to her benefit and her elderly clients’ detriment, living a life of luxury at their expense. But when her seemingly innocent next victim turns out to have dangerous secrets, Marla must use her wit and cunning to stay alive.

Jamie Bell is set to star in the World War II thriller, Dynamite Room, based on the novel by Jason Hewitt. Set during July 1940, the story opens with 12-year-old evacuee, Lydia, walking through a village in rural England on a baking hot day wearing a gas mask. When she arrives at her abandoned family home, she meets Heiden (Bell), a gun-wielding soldier heralding a full-blown German invasion. He won’t kill Lydia, but she cannot leave the house. What is he looking for? Why is he familiar and how does he already know her name?

Simon Pegg and Lulu Wilson are set to star in Becky, an action thriller directed by Bushwick duo Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion. The film centers on Becky (Wilson), a rebellious 13-year-old who is brought to a weekend getaway at a lake house by her father in an effort to reconnect after her mother’s death. The trip takes a turn for the worse when a group of convicts on the run, led by the merciless Dominick (Pegg), invades the lake house, and Becky decides to take matters into her own hands.

Guy Burnet and Nora Arnezeder are set to star in the psychological thriller, Glorious Empire, written and directed by Matt Szymanowski. The project begins as a love story that turns into a living nightmare as Jeremy (Burnet) suspects his girlfriend, Dagmara (Arnezeder), is gaslighting Jeremy and his family in order to cover up an affair with Jeremy’s brother.  Even Jeremy’s concerned parents question his mental state, until it is revealed that Dagmara may have gotten away with the ultimate deception. The pic is described as a modern day homage to thrillers such as Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction and Single White Female.

 

Altitude will launch sales in Cannes for the ’80s homage thriller, Coming Soon, which follows a series of bizarre murders inspired by classic ’80s films that are discovered in the sleepy UK town of Cliff Valley. The inhabitants find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation and three movie-obsessed friends are caught up in the race to catch the killer.

Michelle Yeoh has committed to star in Gunpowder Milkshake, joining Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Angela Bassett, and Paul Giamatti. The project is a female driven high-concept assassin film that has a rich mythology and spans multiple generations.

Liam Neeson will star in The Minuteman, an action thriller to be directed by Robert Lorenz, who has three Oscar nominations as a producer for American Sniper, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Mystic River. The film is a fast-paced story of a retired Vietnam vet who finds himself responsible for the life of a young boy being hunted by a cartel (shades of the protector character Neeson nailed in his three Taken films).

Mel Gibson and Kate Bosworth are set to star in Force of Nature. The film centers on a cop who must protect the remaining residents of a building in the midst of a hurricane evacuation while violent criminals attempt to pull off a mysterious heist within the building. Gibson plays the stubborn retired detective who refuses to evacuate, and fights back when the thieves show up at his doorstep

The first trailer was released for Do Not Reply, a gruesome serial killer thriller starring Jackson Rathbone as a VR-obsessed killer and is a cautionary tale of the evils of social media.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

ABC has handed its first new drama series pickup to a graphic novel adaptation headlined by Avengers co-star Cobie Smulders. Based on the Stumptown graphic novel series, the project follows Dex Parios (Smulders) as a strong, assertive, and sharp-witted army veteran with a complicated love life, gambling debt, and a brother to take care of in Portland, Oregon. Her military intelligence skills make her a great P.I., but her unapologetic style puts her in the firing line of hardcore criminals and not quite in alliance with the police. The production also made the announcement that after the pilot aired, the role played by Mark Webber will be recast after the decision was made to take the character “in a different direction.”

ABC’s NYPD Blue sequel series will not air this fall but remains under consideration for midseason. The police drama will have to undergo some reshoots and retooling before ABC makes a final verdict on the project. Written and executive produced by original series writers Matt Olmstead and Nick Wootton, the new drama centers on Theo (played by Fabien Frankel), the son of Andy Sipowicz’s character (Dennis Franz in the original 1993 series) as he tries to earn his detective shield and work in the 15th squad while investigating his father’s murder.

Another classic show revival attempt, New York Undercover, a reboot of the 1990s Dick Wolf cop drama, will not be going forward at ABC. Wolf and the pilot’s leading studio, Universal TV, are still committed to the project and plan to shop it elsewhere. ABC also cancelled The Fix, the drama series from ex-O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark that centered on Maya Travis (Robin Tunney), an L.A. D.A. who suffers a devastating defeat when prosecuting an A-list actor for double murder.

Nathan Fillion fans will rejoice in news that ABC has renewed The Rookie for a second season. Fillion plays John Nolan, the oldest rookie in the LAPD, who cast aside his comfortable, small town life and moved to L.A. to pursue his dream of being a police officer. ABC also renewed How to Get Away with Murder and Station 19.

 

John Lithgow is set for a lead role opposite Matthew Rhys and Tatiana Maslany in Perry Mason, HBO’s limited-run series. The reimagined Perry Mason is set in 1932 Los Angeles, which is booming while the rest of the country recovers from the Great Depression. It's an origin story for one of American fiction’s most legendary criminal defense lawyers, Perry Mason (Rhys), before he became the iconic attorney.

Kristin Scott Thomas has joined Rebecca, Ben Wheatley’s new adaptation for Netflix of the classic Daphne du Maurier novel. The project also stars Lily James playing the second Mrs. de Winter, who arrives at Manderley with new husband Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer). Kristin Scott Thomas will play Hammer’s longtime housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who was played by Judith Anderson in the original 1940 film of the same name starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

A day after the CW ordered the Nancy Drew pilot to series, producers announced a casting change, with Scott Wolf replacing Freddie Prinze Jr. as Nancy’s dad, Carson Drew. Carson Drew is described as a dynamic attorney who has become estranged from Nancy following the recent death of his beloved wife. But his attempts to reconnect with his daughter run aground when Nancy’s murder investigation reveals unsettling secrets from Carson’s own past.

Levy Tran will be promoted to series regular on the just-ordered fourth season of CBS’s action drama series, MacGyver. Tran was introduced as a recurring new character in the second half of the current third season designed to help fill the void left by the departure of series’ original co-lead George Eads. Tran plays Desiree Nguyen (Desi), who joins the Phoenix Foundation to protect MacGyver (Lucas Till) and his team on their global missions.

Oxygen Media announced nearly a dozen series projects that embrace the true-crime genre, greenlighting shows featuring the likes of Kim Kardashian, Nancy Grace, Kate Snow, Mark Wahlberg, Ice-T, Jason Blum, and others. The new series don’t have airdates just yet.

CBS has made its first drama series orders of the season, picking up Dick Wolf’s FBI: Most Wanted spinoff and the legal drama, All Rise (fka Courthouse) from writer Greg Spottiswood. Wolf currently has six drama series picked up for next season, the two FBI dramas at CBS, the three Chicago series on NBC and Law & Order: SVU, also on NBC, heading into a record-breaking 21st season. Another pickup recently announced is the police drama, Tommy, starring Edie Falco as the first female Chief of Police for Los Angeles.

CBS announced it is renewing the police procedural Hawaii Five-0 for Season 10, with series' current regulars, Scott Caan, Alex O'Loughlin, Chi McBride, and Jorge Garcia, returning to fight crime in the Aloha State. Other crime dramas renewed include SEAL Team, S.W.A.T., and MacGyver. They join previously renewed procedurals NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans, Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, Magnum P.I., and FBI.

Although Bull was also renewed by CBS, the sexual harassment allegations against star Michael Weatherly has led Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television to walk away from the popular legal drama. A rep for Amblin confirmed to Deadline that Steven Spielberg, Amblin Television, Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey are no longer attached to Bull, declining further comment.

There are a few other CBS crime dramas that are still on the bubble and yet to be renewed or canceled, including Instinct, based on the James Patterson novel and starring Alan Cumming as a former CIA operative who is lured back to his old life when the NYPD needs his help to stop a serial killer; The Code, in which the military's brightest minds take on the United States' toughest legal challenges; The Red line, which follows the lives of three vastly different Chicago families whose stories of loss and tragedy intersect in the wake of the mistaken shooting of an African-American doctor by a white cop; and Ransom, centered on renowned crisis and hostage negotiator, Eric Beaumont, who employs insight into human behavior to deal with challenging kidnap and ransom cases.

Blindspot fans can breathe a sigh of relief for now. After being on the bubble, the mystery drama starring Sullivan Stapleton and Jaimie Alexander has been renewed for a fifth and final season by NBC. The pickup comes despite NBC’s recent decision to bench Blindspot for the May sweep. NBC also picked up the pilot Emergence to series; the multi-faceted mystery stars Allison Tolman as a police chief who takes in a child with no memory after an accident, which leads to a conspiracy larger than the chief ever imagined. And the peacock network also ordered a full series of Lincoln, the adaptation of the crime fiction novels of Jeffery Deaver about a a quadriplegic forensic criminalist.

 

ABC has canceled the Shondaland legal drama, For the People, after two seasons. Set in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (a.k.a. “The Mother Court”), the Shondaland series centered on six talented young lawyers working on opposite sides of the law. It first debuted as a midseason replacement last year, and has since struggled to gain a foothold in the ratings.

Fox announced its new series pickups, including Prodigal Son, which centers on Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne), an acclaimed criminal psychologist, who knows how killers think because his father (Michael Sheen) was one of the worst; neXt, starring John Slattery as 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; and the police drama, Deputy, headlined by Stephen Dorff.

Fans of Lethal Weapon won't be happy to hear that Fox has cancelled the show after three seasons. The program's fate was essentially sealed when Clayne Crawford was fired in the wake of multiple behind-the-scenes issues, and star Damon Wayans also announced he was leaving the show.

The spring season of show pickups and cancellations can be a bit dizzying, but Deadline has a handy photo gallery of all the cancelled shows (thus far), and TV Guide also has a list.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest episode of Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast features the mystery short story, “Liquor Store Holdup” by K.M. Rockwood, read by Sean Hopper. The story was first published in Jack Hardway’s Crime Magazine, v. 2 # 2, March/April 2015.

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean Horner and Rincey Abraham discussed the Edgar Awards, the Agatha Awards, and infuriating cookie giving.

Wrong Place, Write Crime host Frank Zafiro chatted with Hanna Jameson about her new novel, The Last.

The Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, focused on “Robbery vs. Burglary, Writer’s Intro to Guns, and Words of Wisdom.”

Spybrary featured the third in their series of commentaries on spy novels read by the students of Fiction and Espionage at the University of Edinburgh. This week, the students discussed The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming.

THEATRE

Dublin, Ireland's Bord Gáis Energy Theatre is presenting the adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel, The Girl on the Train, from June 3-8. Samantha Womack stars in the mystery psychological thriller about a divorcée who becomes entangled in a missing persons investigation that leads to bigger revelations than she could ever have anticipated.

GAMES

Bravo Media is expanding its slate with Spy Games, an espionage-inspired reality competition series hosted by model and martial artist Mia Kang. Spy Games follows ten contestants as they battle it out in the ultimate game of espionage for a $100,000 prize.

There's a John Wick game in the works, based on the film series about the legendary hitman, in what the publishers describe as “fight-choreographed chess brought to life in a video game.” It will be an interactive experience that will implement the “gun fu style” from the movies and expand the universe previously established on the big screen.