The film adaptation of the beloved and bestselling memoir by Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle (S&S/Scribner, 2005), finally has a debut date, set to open in wide release on August 11.
The film stars Academy Award winner Brie Larson as Walls with Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as her dysfunctional, sometimes homeless parents, Rex and Rose Mary.
The memoir spent over 250 weeks on NYT best seller lists, in both hardcover and the trade paperback, where it had its most enduring success. Also a constant in book groups, the memoir is assigned reading in schools, and even has its own Cliff Notes.
Deadline Hollywood reports that Lionsgate plans to pitch the film to women hoping to create the kind of appeal and word of mouth power enjoyed by Eat Pray Love, The Help, and Julie & Julia, all of which also had August release dates.
As we have noted, readers have been waiting for some time for the film version. In 2012, Paramount announced plans to adapt the film with Jennifer Lawrence in the lead, but that project fell through. In 2015, Lionsgate bought the rights and cast Larson in the title role. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who worked with Larson on her breakout film, Short Term 12, has stayed the one constant in the adaptation’s ups and downs.
The great-great grandchildren of Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer featured in the best seller, The Devil in the White City, have received permission to exhume his body to confirm whether he was indeed hanged in Philadelphia in 1896.
The investigation aims to determine the truth of the legend that he faked his own death, reports the Chicago Tribune, by bribing “jail guards to hang a cadaver in his place.”
Meanwhile, the film version of Eric Larson’s true crime title, The Devil in the White City (RH/Crown, 2003), has been in the works ever since it was published. As recently as last month, Deadline Hollywood wrote that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are still developing the project.
Scorsese told the Toronto Sun in December, “Right now, there is a script being worked on … One of the things that I had to stop for the past six months [to complete Silence] was my meetings on that script. They want me to start again in January and see if we can find a way because it’s an extraordinary story.”
Finding a way has proved difficult thus far. Tom Cruise acquired the rights in 2003 but the project stalled. We wrote about the last wave of hopes for it in April 2016. Even earlier, in 2015, we posted about the film’s long gestation period. DiCaprio has owned the rights since 2010.
A new adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s most beloved cases, Murder on the Orient Express (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is steaming towards us, scheduled to arrive on Nov. 22, 2017, ideal timing for awards considerations.
To fit the enormous cast onto the cover of their new issue, Entertainment Weekly took the unusual approach of rotating the image, asserting, “a goodly portion of planet Earth’s most famous residents have gathered” for the shoot (we did what everyone at the newsstands will be doing, flipped it sideways).
According to the magazine, “The book’s large number of supporting characters allowed Branagh to cast stars keen to take roles that were chunkier than cameos but did not demand too much of their time.” In addition to Branagh, who both directs and plays Hercule Poirot, among the others featured on the cover are Daisy Ridley (Star Wars), Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton), Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Josh Gad (Beauty and the Beast), Olivia Colman (Broadchurch), Penélope Cruz, and Johnny Depp.
The mystery places the meticulous Hercule Poirot on the famed Orient Express. The train is delayed by a snowstorm, a perfect setting for murder. Branagh tells The Hollywood Reporter that “This is not only a who dunnit and how dunnit, it’s crucially a why dunnit.”
Underlining Christie’s timeless appeal, the NYT highlighted her recently in one of their “Enthusiast” features (“an occasional column dedicated to the books we love to read and reread”), describing why reading Christie is so pleasurable:
“[Christie] captures something elemental about mysteries: that motive and opportunity may suffice for a crime, but the satisfying part is the detective’s revelation of whodunit, how and why. I never tried to piece together the clues. I vastly preferred to hear it from Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. Why spend time with such endearing, clever characters if you’re not going to let them do their job? And while their job was ostensibly solving crimes, really it was storytelling.”
The trailer is not yet been released. HarperCollins is publishing mass market and trade paperback tie-ins on Oct. 31st.
Fan sites are doing hand springs over the first trailer for the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Dark Tower released this morning.
“After what feels like ages, our first look at The Dark Tower is finally here—and it takes us into another world of death, destruction, and some very fancy gunwork from Idris Elba’s Roland the Gunslinger” writes the SF site io9.
The movie opens on August 4th.
New mass market paperback editions of the first four books in series were published in 2016, when the movie had an earlier release date. New tie-ins have been announced for Book One, The Gunslinger in several formats.
“We are excited to re-introduce this classic American character to a whole new audience by chronicling Doc Holliday’s incredible transformation from Average Joe dentist to a man who Wyatt Earp called the ‘nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun [he] ever knew’,” said Renner and a co-producer in a joint statement. Another producer for the project said, “Jeremy Renner as Doc Holliday…f*cking awesome.”
Renner will join the ranks of Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Stacey Keach, Dennis Quaid, and Val Kilmer, all of whom have played the dentist turned gunfighter in previous films.
Doc won the ALA Reading List award in 2012 and Epitaph was named one of LJ‘s best historical fiction novels of 2015. Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles called Doc “fantastic” and wrote “If I had a six-shooter (and didn’t work in the District), I’d be firing it off in celebration of Doc… I’m in awe of how confidently Russell rides through this familiar territory, takes control and remakes all its rich heroism and tragedy.” The paper later called Epitaph “a remarkable accomplishment.”
It’s a good time to review your inventory of Stephen King’s backlist. Yet another adaptation of one of his novels is on the way.
Deadline Hollywood reports that Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) is adapting Firestarter (S&S/Pocket). This will be the second adaptation, following the 1984 version starring Drew Barrymore as a young girl who “develops pyrokinetic abilities and is abducted by a secret government agency that wants to harness her powerful gift as a weapon.”
In “Rereading Stephen King,” The Guardian acknowledged that the novel is often listed among King’s Top Ten works, “It’s early King, when (collective wisdom has it) he was still writing exciting, original novels, playing in the ballparks of horror-SF that his diehard early readers love.” However, objects their reader, it is “a very thin narrative, stretched over a pretty big book” and call it “easily … the least effective of King’s early works.”
Tor.com did a re-read as well, opening with the comment that it is “the most science fictional of King’s suspense novels, spawned a flop movie and its reputation has become tarnished with time,” concluding “Far from being one of his ‘meh’ books, approaching Firestarterwith an open mind reveals it to be one of King’s most fascinating.”
This is now the 7th King adaptation in the works.
It is coming in September. When the trailer was released Deadline wrote that it “set a 24-hour global record with close to 200 million views.”
The long delayed Dark Tower is due out this summer. io9 wrote about the first footage shown at CinemaCon back in March, saying “It looked like a huge amalgamation of all of Stephen King’s books with plenty of original story worked in. This is not a straight adaptation. No, it’s a new take on this story. Almost an alternate dimension.” Look for a trailer arriving this week. Trailer Track predicts it will be shown ahead of this week’s screenings of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Based on the Marvel comics, and following the surprise hit of 2014, Guardians returns with another helping of action, comedy, and a killer soundtrack. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Sylvester Stallone, and Kurt Russell, the film debuts on May 5. Early tracking numbers that put it on target for a massive money-making opening.
Many tie-ins have already been published, including:
Early reviews largely agree that, while it’s good, it doesn’t live up to first one. Entertainment Weekly gives it a B- and writes, “Alas, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the gag is starting to feel like it’s getting a bit old. It’s still a good Marvel movie (at times, a very good one), but it’s a come down from the dizzying highs of the first installment.” USA Today says it is “just short of magical.”
Also arriving on the 5th is The Dinner, based on the novel of the same name by Herman Koch.
It depicts the tense story of the two Lohman brothers and their wives who are facing deep family strife as they try to decide what to do after their sons commit a terrible crime.
The novel was on the NYT Hardcover Fiction list for seven weeks, reaching a high of #7, although NYT critic Janet Maslin was no fan, writing “The Dinner has been wishfully compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (and enthusiastically endorsed by Ms. Flynn) for its blackhearted deviltry. But her book, with its dueling narrators, had two vicious but sympathetic voices. Her sneaky spouses were delectable in their evil genius. The Lohmans are indigestible.”
The film stars Richard Gere, Steve Coogan, Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall, Chloë Sevigny, and Charlie Plummer. Tie-in: The Dinner (Movie Tie-In Edition), Herman Koch (PRH/Hogarth; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).
Several highly anticipated TV shows begin their runs this week, including Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 26 and runs for ten episodes, staring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, the central character and a rarity in her world, a fertile woman, or ‘handmaid,” she becomes the property of the state, forced to conceive against her will. Joseph Fiennes stars as The Commander, to whom Offred is assigned.
Reviews are glowing. The A.V. Club headlines, “Praise be to the arresting, topical nightmare of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Entertainment Weekly gives it an A, writing it “plays like true prestige television: A masterfully unnerving vision of a near future … Moss is a brilliant muse, a fantastically unsettling alloy of fury and stillness; if this doesn’t earn her the Emmy she was robbed of for her years on Mad Men, the voting Academy should sue itself for gross negligence.” IndieWire says it is “The Scariest TV Show Ever Made, Because It Feels So Real.” Time calls it “masterful … hits exactly the right note … [and] The more you learn about Offred, the more she looks like TV’s great new heroine.” The Hollywood Reporter says it is “A thrillingly dystopian escape from our modern dystopia.”
American Gods starts its 8-episode run on April 30. It has an all-star cast including Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday, Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon, Gillian Anderson as Media, and Kristin Chenoweth as Easter.
Early reviews are largely positive. Entertainment Weekly gives it an A-, with the reviewer writing that he was “consistently engrossed.” Den of Geek writes “The American Gods TV show is something special — for anyone who has ever believed in anything or simply questioned the structure of existence. This show is for you.”
However, Comics Beat headlines that it is “a beautiful mess” and says the show lacks a needed “sense of urgency” and that its “thematic superficiality is heartbreaking.”
Genius begins its 10-episode run on the National Geographic channel on April 25. It is the first scripted series from the cable network, reports Deadline Hollywood, and is part of a planned “anthology drama– telling the stories of the world’s most brilliant innovators.”
This opener is based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe and stars Academy Award-winner Geoffrey Rush as Einstein. Johnny Flynn (Lovesick) plays the younger Einstein while Emily Watson (The Theory of Everything) is Elsa, his second wife. Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are the series executive producers.
It is getting some good buzz. The NYT says “this is not your father’s biopic. It’s about time to meet the real guy behind the cuddly accent and the curvature of space-time … it’s a tense binge-worthy psychological thriller full of political and romantic melodrama.” Forbes writes the series may “inspire a new generation of thinkers and dreamers to expand our knowledge of the world” and calls it impressive and attention grabbing.
Only one theatrical film opens this week,The Circle, premiering on the 28th and starring Emma Watson, Tom Hanks and and John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). It is based on the novel of the same name by Dave Eggers, who also co-wrote the script for the film.
There are no reviews yet but Entertainment Weekly ran a story recently, opening with a reminder that the plot of The Circle, about technology and privacy, is very timely:
“Imagine a world where everything you do is tracked online. Where privacy doesn’t exist. Where corporations have the government’s blessing to extract whatever information they want about you. Welcome to that world. Thanks to a recent party-line vote in Congress, you live in it.” They continue saying, “All of this makes the The Circle … look a lot less like a thriller and more like prophecy.”
Watson tells the magazine, “This is not a dystopian future that’s set in, you know, 2050 or something. This could basically be tomorrow. This is kind of an uncomfortably close film about where, if we aren’t careful, we could very easily go.”
The premium cable network, HBO has discovered the temperature at which paper burns, moving forward with a film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 (S&S; Tantor; OverDrive Sample).
The novel, first published in 1953, depicts a future world where books are outlawed and, if found, burned by firemen. Written during the McCarthy era it has found a new readership following the 2016 election.
Assessing the novel in 2008, over 50 years after it was first published, a writer for The Guardian attested to the novel’s continuing appeal, saying it is “often startling and poetic … almost as memorable for its imagery as its ideas … As far as ideas go, the effect was just as powerful when I read the book anew.”
It won a Retrospective Hugo in 2004 and was adapted by François Truffaut in a 1966 film starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie and was adapted as a graphic novel in 2009: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Tim Hamilton (Macmillan/Hill and Wang).
Haynes, whose films to date have been for adults, won the Queer Palm at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, for Carol based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. This is Haynes’s first film based on a children’s book.
Starring Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams and Okes Fergley Wonderstruck is produced by Amazon studios. A section of the novel is set in 1927 and features a deaf child, Rose, to be played by newcomer Millicent Simmonds, a 13-year-old deaf actress. Haynes has chosen to film her section as a silent movie, using what Deadline calls “an unprecedented number of deaf actors in roles that would normally go to hearing actors.”
Wonderstruck spent 25 weeks on the NYT Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover best seller list, won the 2012 Schneider Family Book Award and was named an ALA Notable Children’s Book.
The chilling trailer for the series adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, The Mist, has been released. The 10-episode series is set to debut on Spike TV on June 22. No tie-ins have been announced.
The pace of King adaptations is picking up. Last year brought the generally well-received J.J. Abrams’ mini-series adaptation of 11.22.63 on Hulu in February, followed by the much less successful film adaptation of Cell, released in July.
Several more will follow The Mist this year.
The Dark Tower — After many delays, the film, starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is now firmly set for release on August 4th. Fans are clamoring for the trailer, but so far, have had to content themselves with reports about the footage shown at CinemaCon in March.
It — Starring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise, this film debuts on September 28th. A teaser arrived late last month. CORRECTION: As pointed out in the comments below, we incorrectly identified the actor playing Pennywise as ALEXANDER Skarsgård from Big Little Lies.
Mr. Mercedes (TV Series) — Currently filming, the release is expected this year. After visiting the set, Stephen King tweeted that it looks “awesome,” adding the same accolade for The Mist and The Dark Tower, as well as two titles in post-production, but with no release dates yet, 1922, based on his short story, and Gerald’s Game,based on his novel.
The adaptation of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z debuted in just four theaters over the weekend, but it made plenty of noise with critics who are raving about it (the one hold out is the Wall Street Journal‘s critic). It expands to 400 theaters this coming weekend.
Two small screen adaptations make their debuts in the coming week.
HBO’s adaptation of Rebecca Skloot’s long-running bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will begin airing on Sunday, April 22 at 8 p.m.
Oprah Winfrey stars as Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter. Rose Byrne (Damages) plays Skloot. Renée Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton) plays Henrietta and Courtney B. Vance (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) plays con artist Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield. The Broadway superstar and Tony winning George C. Wolfe (Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk) wrote the screenplay and directs.
Winfrey tells the NYT that she took the role because she wanted to work with the director, “Audra McDonald said, ‘It will change your life and change you as an actress to work with George.’ And she’s right. He was the person who was able to take a script that felt overridden by the science and re-adapt that into a story about a woman in search of her identity through her mother. That’s why it happened.”
Also coming to TV is Famous in Love, an adaptation of Rebecca Serle’s 2014 novel of the same name. It will air on Freeform, reports Deadline Hollywood, following Pretty Little Liars.
Bella Thorne (The DUFF) plays Paige, a college student who becomes a major Hollywood star and It Girl almost overnight. Kirkus said the book was a “frothy but not frivolous … wish fulfillment for any teen who wants to feel the thrill of celebrity and love.”
He is in negotiations to star as the real-life con man Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the subject of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor by Mark Seal (PRH/Plume, 2012). Kirkus said of the true crime story, “Patricia Highsmith couldn’t have written a more compelling thriller.”
Gerhartsreiter, who went by the name of Clark Rockefeller, tricked people into believing he was a member of that famous family, helping him to land prestigious jobs on Wall Street and marry rich. He was sentenced to jail after kidnapping his own daughter and was subsequently sentenced to prison for the first-degree murder of his landlady’s son.
A long simmering project, the film first got under way in 2011, but the recent interest in true crime may have given it a fresh push.
Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment production company has won the film rights to Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), reports Deadline Hollywood. Howard will direct.
Vance’s memoir arrived as the presidential campaign was heating up. The media embraced his sympathetic portrait of life in the Rust Belt as an explanation for the deep divides that drove the election. As a result of growing media attention, the book landed on best seller lists several weeks after publication. It is currently #2 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction list after 36 weeks.
It came to define what Slate‘s Laura Miller calls a new genre of nonfiction, the on-the-ground Trump explainer … illuminating the desperation driving white small-town Americans, as told by a native son.” She calls Vance’s book the genre’s “vanguard title.”
In a statement, Imagine describes it as “a powerful, true coming-of-age memoir … Through the lens of a colorful, chaotic family and with remarkable compassion and self-awareness, J.D. has been able to look back on his own upbringing as a ‘hillbilly’ to illuminate the plight of America’s white working class, speaking directly to the turmoil of our current political climate.”
Boss Baby continued to rule the box office over the weekend, happily beating out another movie aimed at kids, the formulaic Smurfs: Lost Village. On TV, the adaptation of Jay Asher’s best-selling 2007 YA novel 13 Reasons Why is a hit for Netflix and is stirring up controversy about whether there should be a second season.
Two adaptations come to screens this week.
Having received much advance attention for its star studded cast, The Lost City of Zfinally hits theaters in a limited run at the end of this week, expanding to more theaters next week. Based on David Gann’s nonfiction account of Percy Fawcett’s search for a fabled lost city, it stars Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, and Tom Holland.
Already released in the UK, The Telegraph says it is “Transporting and profound … an instant classic.” Business Insider says it is “the best movie of 2017 so far” and director James Gray’s “magnum opus.” The Wrap says it “blends knock-out visual beauty, tender feminism, overall personal inter-connectedness, and something else, too, something yearning and just out of reach … [it] feels like a clear artistic advance for Gray, who proves himself here as one of our finest and most distinctive living filmmakers.”
Reviewing it after its NY Film Festival debut, Variety called it “Apocalypse Now meets Masterpiece Theater … a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful.”
The book received raves. The NYT critic Michiko Kakutani wrote it is at “once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd … it reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller and all the verisimilitude and detail of firsthand reportage.”
It topped most of the year’s best books lists the year it was published. Grann is now back in the news for a new book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (PRH/Doubleday; RH Large Type; RH Audio/BOT).
On cable The White Princess begins on April 16, about the long-running War of the Roses.
It’s the sequel to The White Queen, which aired on Starz in 2013, based on the first four books in Philippa Gregory’s The Cousins’ War series and earned both Golden Globe and Emmy nominations.
The new series adapts Gregory’s fifth title in the historical saga and relates the story of Princess Elizabeth of York, forced to marry into the house of her enemy. Gregory outlines the chronology of the novels on her website.
It stars Jodie Comer as Princess Elizabeth, Essie Davis as Elizabeth Woodville, Joanne Whalley as the Duchesss of Burgundy, Michelle Fairley as Margaret Beaufort, Jacob Collins-Levy as Henry VII, and Suki Waterhouse as Cecily of York.
The film adaptation of the beloved and bestselling memoir by Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle (S&S/Scribner, 2005), finally has a debut date, set to open in wide release on August 11.
