THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
David Leitch (Deadpool 2; Hobbs & Shaw) has signed on to direct the thriller, Bullet Train, with another action-thriller veteran, Antoine Fuqua (director of the Equalizer movies starring Denzel Washington), on board as producer. Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese manga, centers on a group of assassins with conflicting motives on a train in Tokyo. The film is a contained thriller, which means it can be shot on a contained set and thus fall in line easier under health restrictions than a more sprawling action movie with actual locations.
Vertical Entertainment has picked up North American rights to the mystery-thriller, Viscous, starring Mena Suvari (American Beauty). The film, from debut writer-director Braden R. Duemmler, follows a socially awkward teenager who is blindsided when her mother introduces her new fiancée. At first, his charm, intelligence, and beauty seem too good to be true, and after a series of strange occurrences the teenage daughter realizes that this new member of their family is not exactly who he seems.
Gerard Butler is set to star in the action film, Kandahar, with Ric Roman Waugh directing. (Butler and Waugh also teamed up last year on the hit action pic Angel Has Fallen). Waugh will direct from a screenplay he wrote with former military intelligence officer Mitchell LaFortune. In the film, Butler will play Tom Harris, an undercover CIA operative working in the Middle East. An intelligence leak dangerously exposes his classified mission and reveals his covert identity. Stuck in the heart of hostile territory, Harris and his translator must fight their way out of the desert to an extraction point in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while eluding the elite special forces hunting them.
The Mickey Rourke, Sean Stone, and Eric Roberts crime drama, Night Walk, has secured North American distribution. Directed and produced by Moroccan-born filmmaker Aziz Tazi, Night Walk follows Frank (played by Oliver Stone’s son, Sean Stone), a Western traveler visiting the Middle East, where his girlfriend Sarah lives. After a tragic incident leading to Sarah’s death, Frank is wrongfully imprisoned by corrupt police, and under the guidance of the prison’s top shot-caller (Mickey Rourke) and the protection of his Muslim cellmate, he unravels political corruption at the top seats of government in his quest for justice.
Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk) has been cast opposite Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) in the thriller, Hunters In The Dark, with veteran theater director, Simon Evans, making his feature filmmaking debut. The project tells the story of 28-year-old English school teacher, Robert Grieve (Pettyfer), who unexpectedly wins a bag full of cash. Adrift in Cambodia and eager for a way out of his life of quiet desperation, he decides to take a journey deeper into the wilder aspects of the country, coming up against a scheming American, a crooked police officer, and a darker side of Cambodia.
Saban Films has bought North American and UK rights to Jared Cohn’s Reactor starring Bruce Willis as the leader of a gang of mercenaries holding a nuclear power plant hostage. Casting is underway for the lead role, a former soldier who takes down Willis and his crew. Cohn wrote the script with Cam Cannon and Stephen Cyrus Sepher.
The estate of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is suing Netflix, Legendary Films, and author Nancy Springer over copyright and trademark issues associated with the upcoming film, Enola Homes. The suit claims that, despite most of the original pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes tales having been judged to be in the public domain, the author’s last 10 stories about the character — published between 1923 and 1927 — are not. The movie stars Millie Bobby Brown as the much-younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, who proves to be a highly capable detective in her own right. Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, and Adeel Akhtar also star in the film that is set to stream on Netflix.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
Langdon, the NBC series based on Dan Brown’s novel, The Lost Symbol, has added to its cast. Sumalee Montano (Star Trek: Picard), Arrow alum Rick Gonzalez, and Beau Knapp (The Good Lord Bird) are set as series regulars opposite Ashley Zukerman. Written by Dan Dworkin and Jay Beattie, Langdon follows the early adventures of famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Zukerman), who must solve a series of deadly puzzles to save his kidnapped mentor and thwart a chilling global conspiracy. The project, which hails from Imagine Television, CBS TV Studios and Universal Television, is among five 2020 pilots which NBC has committed to filming later this year, once production can safely begin amid coronavirus restrictions.
ViacomCBS International Studios and Miramax will co-produce The Turkish Detective, a crime series set in modern-day Istanbul based on the 21 inspector Cetin Ikmen novels by Barbara Nadel. Each episode "follows Ikmen and his partner Mehmet Suleyman as they solve a series of crimes, with the stories heavily rooted in the rich culture and history of Istanbul."
AMC will air the British drama, Gangs of London, in the U.S. after HBO’s Cinemax exited the project, which has been renewed for a second season. The ten-part show was a big hit for Sky in the UK, becoming its biggest premiere streaming series this year and the biggest original drama launch on Sky Atlantic in the past five years.
Turner networks TNT and TBS have put four projects in development including The Fall and Liar's Club. The Fall is a paranoid thriller about a woman whose dark secrets start to unravel her seemingly perfect life and is inspired by the Albert Camus tale of the same name. Liar's Club is described as "part comedy, part pulp thriller" or "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel meets Breaking Bad." it follows a woman leading two very different lives, one adorned in the trappings of Connecticut country clubs, and the other drenched in the murkiness of the underground gambling circuit in NYC.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up featuring the mystery short story "Vengeance in Cadmium Blue" by Margaret Mendel as read by actor Ariel Linn.
Writer Types host, Eric Beetner, talked with authors Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jennifer Chow (Mimi Lee Gets A Clue); and Richard Prosch (the Dan Spalding series).
Michael Elias was also the guest on Speaking of Mysteries to discuss You Can Go Home Now, a psychological thriller where a woman cop is on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.
Meet the Thriller Author welcomed Marc Cameron, author of the New York Times bestselling Jericho Quinn Thriller series.
Writer's Detective Bureau host, veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, discussed the role SWAT plays in an investigation after they’ve busted the suspect; what a witness or visitor to an FBI Office might see; and what the cocaine production process looks like.
Casey Cep, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was the guest on It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club, chatting about her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, an instant New York Times bestseller.
THEATRE
Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, is being adapted for the theatre for the first time, and is set to premiere on April 3, 2021 at the Churchill theatre in Bromley, London, under the direction of Luke Sheppard. The stageplay, which involves the murder of the Louvre’s curator and the race to solve a series of baffling codes left beside his body, is being written by the same team who adapted The Girl on the Train for the stage, Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel.
