Here are some of the most notable adaptations announced in January 2020:
– The Los Angeles Media Fund acquired Seymour Reit’s book The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa, originally published in 1981 by Summit Books. William Wheeler will script the adaptation, and Jodie Foster is attached to direct.
– John W. Campbell’s Frozen Hell is set up at Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures. The novel was published in April 2019 by Wildside Press although, originally, it was previously released as an abridged 1938 novella titled Who Goes There?, which was in turn adapted into the 1951’s The Thing from Another World, 1982’s The Thing, and 2011’s The Thing.
– Lionsgate, Point Grey Pictures, and BOOM! Studios will produce James Tynion IV and Eryk Donovan’s graphic novel Memetic. Mattson Tomlin will script the adaptation, and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are attached as producers. BOOM! Studios also published the three-part comic, beginning October 2014.
– The Gotham Group will adapt the YA novel The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed. Simon & Schuster will release the novel in September 2020. Allison Davis will write the screenplay, and Wanuri Kahiu will direct the adaptation.
– Scrambled Eggs Productions and CounterNarrative Films have acquired Camas Davis’s memoir Killing It: An Education. Davis will produce, Pamela Fryman will direct, and Ashley Williams will star. The book was published by Penguin Random House in 2018.
– Walter Mosley will script an adaptation of his novel The Man in My Basement for B.O.B. Filmhouse, Protagonist Pictures, and Good Thing Entertainment. Nadia Latif is attached to direct. The novel was published in January 2004 by Little, Brown and Company.
– Mean Girls is a go with Paramount, Little Stranger, and Broadway Video. Tina Fey will write the script, based on the Broadway musical (book by Fey, music by Jeff Richmond, lyrics by Nell Benjamin), which was based on her 2004 movie (directed by Mark Waters), which was based on the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. Although we’re pretty far removed from the source material at this point, Three Rivers Press published the original book in May 2002.
– Searchlight Pictures (previously known as Fox Searchlight) and Noah Hawley’s 26 Keys has tapped Issa López to script/direct an adaptation of Matthew Baker’s short story “Lost Souls.”
– Warner Bros. and Populace will adapt Ales Kot’s The New World, with Jeremy O. Harris writing the script. Image Comics published the graphic novel in 2019.
– John August has been tapped to script an adaptation of Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story of the Wizard of Oz for Warner Brothers Animation. Written by Michael Morpurgo and illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark, the children’s book was published in 2017 by Harper Collins.
Additional script sales can be found here on Script Pipeline.