Here are some of the most notable adaptations announced in November 2020:
– MGM, Plan B Entertainment (Brad Pitt’s production company), and Harpo Films (Oprah Winfrey) have acquired Ta-Nehisi Coates’ debut novel The Water Dancer. Coates will adapt the script. One World published the novel in September 2019.
– Over at Universal Pictures, Molly Smith Metzler has been tapped to script the adaptation of Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s nonfiction novel Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield. Lesli Linka Glatter will direct. Harper first published the book in April 2015.
– Moving Image Productions has optioned Louise Candlish’s upcoming noir/thriller The Other Passenger. Joseph Cross will produce and direct. Simon & Schuster will publish the novel in July 2021.
– Frenesy (Luca Guadagnino) and Searchlight Pictures have assigned Matthew López to script the adaptation of Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men. The novel was published in February 2019 by Penguin Books.
– Character Seven has optioned a pair of thriller novels by Holly Watt: The Dead Line, originally published in April 2020 by Raven Books, and To the Lions, published September 2019 by Dutton.
– SK Global and The Mazur/Kaplan Company have acquired a whole slew of novels:
1) Tananarive Due’s upcoming horror novel The Reformatory. Due will script the adaptation with Steven Barnes.
2) Tim Johnston’s mystery/thriller novel The Current, published in January 2019 by Algonquin Books. Miki Johnson will provide the script.
3) Ros Anderson’s dark comedy/sci-fi novel The Hierarchies, published August 2020 by Dutton. Margot Robbie will also produce.
4) Brad Meltzer and John Mensch’s historical novel The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America’s 16th President—and Why It Failed, published September 2020 by Thorndike Press Large Print.
– Christy Hall and Lynne Ramsay will script an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for Village Roadshow Pictures, Vertigo Entertainment, and Stampede Ventures. Ramsay will also direct. Scribner originally published the book.
– Patrick Marber will adapt Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call for Mark Gordon Pictures, Culmination Productions, and Fearless Minds. Colin Firth, Gemma Arterton, Simon Russell Beale and Pappa Essiedu are attached to star; Anand Tucker to direct. Jonathan Cape published in 2015.
– Linda Woolverton will script a film adaptation of the children’s book series Eloise, written by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight. Media Rights Capital and Handmade Films Ltd. picked up the books last December. The first in the series, Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups, was first published in 1955 by Simon & Schuster.
– Scott B. Smith, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy will script the adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried. Hardy Son & Baker (Tom Hardy and Dean Baker) and MJZ will produce. The star-studded cast includes Tye Sheridan, Tom Hardy, Bill Skarsgard, and Pete Davidson, and Rupert Sanders will direct. Houghton Mifflin originally published the novel back in 1990.
– Amglin Partners (Steven Spielberg) optioned Judy Batalion’s upcoming nonfiction novel The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos. She’ll script the adaptation with Michael Mitnick. William Morrow will publish in April 2021.
Additional script sales can be found here on Script Pipeline.