Hitting Screens, Week of March 21, 2016
Fulfilling hints last week that the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, Allegiant, would open to some hard critical hits, The Guardian gives it two stars (out of five), saying “All types of people will find something that irks them in the penultimate part of the Divergent franchise,” while A.V. Club gave it a C+, under the headline “Allegiant is the best Divergent yet, and still not good enough.”
The news for The Little Prince was even worse, it was yanked from distribution just a few days before it was due to open. UPDATE: Netflix has since picked up the rights with plans to stream it “later this year.”
Whether or not it does well at the box office, Miracles from Heaven, starring Jennifer Garner opening today has already propelled the tie-in onto best seller lists. It moved to #20 on the week’s USA Today list.
On to next week. Viewers will have a chance to re-visit a number of favorite characters from the past.
The biggest movie opening is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Starring Ben Affleck as Batman, Henry Cavill as Superman, and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. It opens March 25th.
Anticipation is high for the iconic smackdown as Batman decides Superman is a bit out of control. Deadline reports advanced ticket sales are outpacing those for Deadpool, Avengers, and Furious 7.
A junior novel tie-in came out last month. It was billed as a companion novel and riffs off the movie, Cross Fire: An Original Companion Novel (Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice), Michael Kogge (Scholastic Inc.; OverDive Sample).
I Saw The Light also opens on the 25th. It tells the story of country-western singer Hank Williams and stars Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen.
A tie-in came out last November: I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams, Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen (Hachette/Back Bay Books; OverDrive Sample).
In TV-land PBS fans mourning the end of Downton can console themselves with the start of the second season of Grantchester, starring the dishy village vicar who loves jazz music and a married woman. It will run from March 27 until May 1.
These slightly less than cozy tales are adapted from the books by James Runcie, which collect a series of short mystery stories into several volumes. A tie-in edition, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA; OverDrive Sample), comes out March 22.
Fans of The Bridge get ready for part 2. Hallmark fast tracked it after the success of part one which aired in December.
A tie-in edition came out in October 2015, The Bridge by Karen Kingsbury (S&S/Howard Books; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).
Over on NBC Heartbeat begins. The show is loosely based on the real life story of Dr. Kathy Magliato, one of the nation’s few women heart surgeons. She wrote a medical memoir, Healing Hearts, which was reissued as Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon (PRH/Harmony; OverDrive Sample) back in 2011. It now bears the sticker, “The Book That Inspired Heartbeat Now on NBC.”
The show begins airing on March 23.