Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

QC Entertainment, the production company behind recent Best Picture Oscar contenders BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, has snapped up rights to J.D. Barker’s forthcoming erotic thriller novel, Behind a Closed Door, with plans to adapt it for film. Billed as "50 Shades of Grey meets David Fincher’s The Game," Behind a Closed Door introduces readers to Sugar & Spice, the latest app craze taking the world by storm, which leads downloaders Abby and Brendan Hollander into a dangerous game of life and death. When the app assigns the pair a series of increasingly taboo tasks, they soon find themselves caught up in a twisted web of seduction and violence.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is set for a movie comeback, after a four-year hiatus, in the action-thriller, Breakout, directed by The Expendables 4 filmmaker, Scott Waugh. Schwarzenegger plays Terry Reynolds, whose stepson is framed and sentenced to 25 years in prison in a foreign country. Reynolds makes a daring jailbreak to save him and must overcome an overzealous prison warden in a race against time to avoid capture and flee the country. Richard D’Ovidio wrote the screenplay based on a story he co-created with Nicole D’Ovidio.

James McAvoy is set to star in Control, a high-concept action thriller that will be directed by Red helmer, Robert Schwentke. Control is adapted from the award-winning podcast, Shipworm by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, and is described as "a tense ticking-clock thriller revolving around a doctor who awakens one morning with an untraceable device planted in his head. He must follow a mysterious voice’s instructions or devastating consequences will unfold." The script was written by Akers, with the latest revision by Andrew Baldwin.

Signature Entertainment has acquired UK and Irish rights to the J.K. Simmons thriller, You Can’t Run Forever, from Voltage Pictures. The movie follows a teenage girl (Isabelle Anaya) struggling with a tragic past who is hunted through the woods by a sociopath (Oscar winner Simmons) on a murderous rampage. The project is directed by Michelle Schumacher (I’m Not Here) from a script co-written with Carolyn Carpenter, and also stars Allen Leech and Fernanda Urrejola

TELEVISION/STREAMING

MGM+ is moving forward with its series adaptation of the suspense thriller, Emperor of Ocean Park, based on Stephen L. Carter’s best-selling novel. The 10-episode series is set in the worlds of politics, Ivy League academia, and the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, and centers on Talcott Garland, an Ivy League law professor whose quiet life is shattered when his father, Judge Oliver Garland, dies of an apparent heart attack. The nature of the judge’s death is questioned by Tal’s sister, Mariah, a former journalist and inveterate conspiracy theorist, who believes that the judge, a failed Black nominee to the Supreme Court, met with foul play.

Hallmark Movies & Mysteries has cancelled the Mystery 101 TV movie series. The films, which debuted in January 2019, were created by Robin Bernheim and Lee Goldberg and starred Kristoffer Polaha, Jill Wagner, and Robin Thomas. Wagner plays Amy Winslow, a professor of English literature at Elmstead College, in the fictional small coastal town of Garrison, Washington, specializing in mystery and crime fiction. Amy assists Travis Burke, a big city police detective who has recently moved to Garrison, abetted by Amy's widower father, Graham Winslow, himself the author of a bestselling series of detective novels. Unlike most Hallmark movies, the seventh Mystery 101 film ended on a large cliffhanger with an 11-month time jump that will apparently go unresolved, to the dismay of fans.

Netflix has acquired the rights to adapt the Danish novel series Department Q, which it plans to turn into a series adaptation, with one twist: it's going to be filmed in Edinburgh, Scotland, not Denmark. Department Q is based on a best-selling series of crime novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and centers on guilt-wracked Copenhagen detective Carl Mørck, demoted to a cold case unit after a botched raid in which his partner is paralyzed and another police officer killed. Scott Frank, whose adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit was a smash hit for Netflix in 2020, will direct. The script is by Chandni Lakhani, who worked on The Dublin Murders and the BBC Scotland hit, Vigil.

Netflix has put Bandidos, a thriller series about an underwater heist, into production. The drama follows the story of Miguel (Alfonso Dosal) and accomplice Lilí (Ester Expósito), who are joined by a group of bandits as they attempt to retrieve treasure from the underwater grave of a Spanish galleon that sank in the Gulf of Mexico during the War of Independence. However, they’re not the only ones after the bounty. The series is set to launch in 2024 and marks one of Netflix’s biggest bets out of Mexico since it shot drug drama, Narcos: Mexico, in the country.

The crime heist drama series, Vanda, is headed to Hulu. Created by Patricia Müller (Madre Paula) and written by Muller and Carmen Jimenez (Adiós), Vanda is based on the true story of a hair stylist in Lisbon, who, in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis—after finding herself alone, broke, and with two children to raise—embarks on a string of bank heists using a blonde wig and a toy gun. When Vanda was finally caught, she was sentenced to seven years in prison and had stolen a grand total of €17,000. Gabriela Barros stars as the title character with João Baptista, Pedro Casablanc, Raúl Prieto, and Joana de Verona rounding out the cast.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon spoke with crime fiction author S.A. Cosby and musician Questlove, who teamed up for the Y.A. time-travel thriller, The Rhythm of Time

The Red Hot Chili Writers chatted with Sophie Hannah about her new Hercule Poirot novel, and also talked about other authors whose iconic characters have been taken up after their death.

Crime Time FM, the official podcast of the Gwyl Crime Cymru Festival in Wales, offered up the second installment of their series interviewing writers taking part in the event's crime fiction conference panels.