While Sully still soars at the box office, other book-related movies were considered flops, including the heavily promoted Bridget Jones Baby.

Five adaptations open this week, three films and two TV shows, beginning with a movie that has been an enormous success in Australia, but has taken a perplexingly long time to make it to the U.S. The Dressmaker stars Kate Winslet as a fashionable Australian woman who returns to her rural home, shaking things up and getting revenge. It was the second highest grossing Australian film of 2015, losing out to  Mad Max: Fury Road.

Amazon bought the US film rights reports Variety, and will release the film in a limited number of theaters on the 23rd, before making it available via streaming.

In the U.K. and Australia, much was been made of Liam Hemsworth’s nudity in the film. As it arrives in the U.S. attention is turning to the age difference between Winslet and Hemsworth (and the fact that Winslet dares to play a woman five years younger than she is).

The book was published in the U.S. for the first time last year, when it was expected that the film would get its U.S. release,  The Dressmaker, Rosalie Ham (PRH/Penguin; Penguin Audio; Thorndike Large Print;  OverDrive Sample).

Disney’s big movie, Queen of Katwe opens in limited release Sept. 23rd, expanding to more theaters the next week. Starring Lupita Wyong’o, who won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, David Oyelowo (Selma), and newcomer Madina Nalwanga, it is directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding).

Vanity Fair calls it a “Bright and Inspiring Success,” while Roger Ebert.com says it is “thoroughly crowdpleasing.” Collider writes that the Disney production “stands alongside some of the studio’s best efforts, and it’s the best family film involving chess since the charming 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer.”

A tie-in is out: The Queen of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion, Tim Crothers (S&S/Scribner; Mass Market, (S&S/Pocket Books; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Goat also opens on the 23rd. Directed by Andrew Neel, starring Ben Schnetzer, Nick Jonas, and Gus Halper, it is a college fraternity film that traces a series of brutal induction rituals and the strain they place on two brothers. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “A harsh but gripping study in uncontrolled male aggression.”

The Guardian writes that it is  “a pointed, astute and unflinching look at unbridled machismo and its consequences … everything is designed to provoke disgust – and there’s a lot to be disgusted with.”

Variety says “this testosterone-drenched indie-movie adaptation feels like something that might have come out under the MTV Films banner a decade ago (back when the book was published), as director Andrew Neel can’t quite decide whether to indict or endorse the hard-partying behavior on display — painfully aware that half the audience has pledged or will pledge the Greek system.”

A tie-in has been released, Goat (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Memoir, Brad Land (PRH/RH; OverDrive Sample).

The Exorcist TV series begins playing on Fox on the 23rd, over 40 years after the film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel.

Cosmic Booknews says it is “a propulsive psychological thriller” and Cavalcade says it “delivers on both scares and drama. Though not always compelling, it manages to be consistently engaging.”

The series stars Alfonso Herrera, Ben Daniels, and Geena Davis. A tie-in has not been released but 2011 marked the release of the 40th Anniversary Edition (HC).

On the 25th Poldark, Season 2, begins airing on PBS Masterpiece, starring Aidan Turner, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Heida Reed. Of season one, The New York Times wrote:

“Sweeping, stirring, rousing, lush. These are the sorts of adjectives suggested by Poldark … It’s the kind of show in which every plot twist appears to require a shot of someone pounding on horseback along the Cornish coast, close to the cliffs and outlined against the sun … Another adjective that comes to mind is shameless, in the sense of nonstop audience-pandering melodrama. But there’s good shameless and bad shameless, and Poldark is reasonably good stuff, milking the emotions and pleasing the eye without unduly insulting the intelligence.”

The series is based on the Poldark novels by Winston Graham. There are a number of tie-ins and associated titles.

Storm Reid, described by Entertainment Weekly as an “up-and-coming actress.” will star in Ava DuVernay’s film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time as the young protagonist, Meg Murry. Reid’s previous roles were in 12 Years a Slave, an American Girl movie Lea to the Rescue, and Sleight.

Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling will star as Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who in the Disney adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved novel, filling the roles of the helpful celestial beings.

As Entertainment Weekly notes, this will make “DuVernay the first woman of color to direct a live-action movie with a budget of more than $100 million.” The Hollywood Reporter writes that “DuVernay is hoping to break ground with the movie, making a big tentpole with a cast that is multicultural” and that the producers are looking for a non-white actor to play Meg’s friend, Calvin O’Keefe.

It appears the movie will bring new readers to the book. Based on just the casting news, it jumped nearly 100 places on Amzaon’s sales rankings, from #356 to #263.

E.L. James announced on Sept 10th that she is writing another of her “from Grey’s point of view books,” re-telling Fifty Shades Darker from Christian’s perspective, following her re-vamp of Fifty Shades of Grey with the same twist.

The news proceeded the release of the first trailer for the film Fifty Shades Darker, both events causing the trilogy to rise on Amazon (jumping from #1,520 to #226) and the first Christian point of view book, Grey, to jump from #843 to #378. That pales next to the 3.7 million views the trailer had already received on YouTube.

The trailer also prompted a storm of stories, such as those in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.

Variety says that the second film as well as the upcoming third film of the trilogy (which will be shot back-to-back) will be directed by James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards). He replaces Sam Taylor-Johnson with whom James clashed during the filming of the first movie.

The screenplays for the final two films will be written by E. L. James’ husband, Niall Leonard.

Fifty Shades Darker is scheduled for release on Feb. 10, 2017. A tie-in edition has been announced:

Fifty Shades Darker (Movie Tie-in Edition): Book Two of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, E L James
On Sale Date: January 3, 2017
9780525431886, 0525431888
$15.95 USD, $17.95 CAD
Trade Paperback
RH/Vintage

A Spanish-language tie-in will also be published, cincuenta sombras más oscuras (Movie Tie-In)

Rising on Amazon’s sales rankings is The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway, by Ben Mezrich (S&S/Atria; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). Moving from #240 to within the top 100 best sellers, the jump is a result of  the author’s appearance on CBS This Morning.

Mezrich, known for his juicy, edgy, social science books such as Bringing Down the House (adapted as the 2008 movie 21) and The Accidental Billionaires (adapted as the 2010 movie The Social Network) turns away from accounts of college kids making money to focus his attention on a very different type of speculation, whether extraterrestrials exist and the story of a real life alien hunter.

In the interview with CBS, Mezrich says he went into the project as a non-believer, but in the course of investigating the tales of unexplained happenings along what is essential the UFO Highway (a 3,000 mile strip across the middle of the country), he now knows “that at least once something happened that still has not been explained” and that “the impediments to believing have dissapeared.”

He says there is a “enormous amount of evidence” and he hopes readers will consider it.

Like his previous books, this one  is already in the process of being adapted into a movie.

Tom Hanks’s turn as Sully in Clint Eastwood’s movie about the hero pilot  is scoring with audiences, based on today’s box office. The tie-in continues on best seller lists, enjoying the promotion from the movie’s advance publicity.

Also doing well is the series Queen Sugar on Oprah’s OWN channel. It’s two-night premiere was a ratings high for the network. The novel it is based on,  Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile (Penguin/Pamela Dorman;see our chat with the author just prior to the book’s publication), has also been rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Opening on Sept 16 is Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third in the franchise based on Helen Fielding;s character.

Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth reprise their roles as Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy and Patrick Dempsey stars a dishy American love interest. Emma Thompson features in the new role as Bridget’s ob-gyn.

Fielding, along with Thompson and David Nicholls wrote the script.

The producers unsurprisingly feel that, fifteen years after the first film in the series arrived and ten years after the most recent one, viewers might need a refresher course. To help that cause they have made an orientation featurette:

Never published as a novel, the tie-in will come out after the film premieres, Bridget Jones’s Baby (PRH/Knopf, Oct. 11, 2016; RH Audio/BOT), presumable to avoid spilling the beans on who fathered Bridget’s baby.

It may not matter if viewers remember the earlier movies. Placing it at #1 on their “Must List” for the week, Entertainment Weekly asserts, “it’s the rom-com romp fans have been waiting for.”

Below is the full trailer:

Also opening on the 16th is Oliver Stone’s Snowden. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, and Timothy Olyphant also star.

According to Variety, Stone co-wrote the screenplay with with Kieran Fitzgerald and based it on Luke Harding’s nonfiction account The Snowden Files (Movie Tie In Edition): The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (PRH/Vintage; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) and the novel Time of the Octopus, Anatoly Kucherena (Glagoslav Publications. Note: Kucherena is Snowden’s Russian lawyer).

That fictional account is not yet published in the US, but The Hollywood Reporter quotes Stone as describing the book as

“a ‘grand inquisitor’-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistle-blower, Joshua Cold, against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions. His meditations on the meaning of totalitarian power in the 21st century make for a chilling, prescient horror story.”

The director has visited Snowden in Russia and shown him the film. For his part, Snowden says “it’s pretty on the money.”

Dennis Lehane’s novel, Live By Night (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2012) hits the big screen on Jan 13, 2017, directed by and starring Ben Affleck.

In addition to Affleck, it stars Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper and Elle Fanning.

Tie-ins in trade paperback and mass market will be published on Dec. 27th. For more tie-ins, check our Edelweiss collection.

The moody first trailer has just been released:

Opening today is the film adaptation, The Light Between Oceans. When we previewed it last week, there were few reviews. They are pouring in now, and it’s getting high marks for gorgeous cinematography, but less for plausibility, or even the ability to jerk tears (see Entertainment Weekly‘s review, as well as the New Yorker‘s). In terms of box office, The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t hold out great hopes, especially since Labor Day weekend tends to be quiet in theaters. The book, however, is already benefitting from the publicity, zooming up USA Today‘s best seller list to #3, its highest position on that list to date.

The big film opening next week is Sully, based on Highest Duty by Chesley Sullenberger (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2009), a memoir by the man who piloted an airplane to safety on New York’s Hudson River after its engines were disabled by a bird strike.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Tom Hanks in the lead role, with Laura Linney as his wife, it opens on Friday, Sept. 9.

Tie-in: Sully : My Search for What Really Matters, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, III, Jeffrey Zaslow (HarperCollins/Morrow,  August 30, 2016). It is currently at #5 on the NYT paperback nonfiction best seller list, two weeks.

Queen Sugar begins airing on Oprah’s OWN channel Sept. 6 and 7th in a two-night premiere.

The series is the number one People pick for the week, called an “unusually fine, seductive new series.” Entertainment Weekly gives it a B, recommending it for people tired of the usual melodramas, because it offers “a refreshing point of difference: a family saga on which loved ones labor together for individual and shared redemption.”

The series is based on the novel Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile (Penguin/Pamela Dorman; Thorndike; 2014; see our chat with the author just prior to the book’s publication). As we wrote earlier, the story takes place in Southern Louisiana and features three sibling who inherit their father’s sugar cane plantation. It was selected as a book of the week by Oprah’s O magazine, saying, “In Queen Sugar, two bulwarks of American literature—Southern fiction and the transformational journey—are given a fresh take by talented first-time novelist Natalie Baszile.”

The two-part premiere is directed by Ava DuVernay (Selma). Upcoming episodes have all been assigned to female directors, many of them first-timers. The series has already been renewed for a second season.

Quarry begins playing on Cinemax on Sept. 9th. As we wrote earlier, it is a dark and moody adaptation of Max Allan Collins’s noir 1970s era series about a hit man. The eight-episode run will star Logan Marshall-Green (Prometheus) as a Marine who comes home to Memphis after the Vietnam War and gets caught in a world of violence and corruption.

Tie-in, Quarry – TV Tie-In Edition, Max Allan Collins (RH/Hard Case Crime, Sept. 27; OverDrive Sample). Publisher Hard Case Crime has recently re-issued the original Quarry novels with their signature retro covers. The latest is Quarry in the Black (RH/Hard Case Crime; October 4, 2016).

Churchill’s Secret begins playing on PBS’s Masterpiece on Sept. 11th. It stars Michael Gambon (Harry Potter, The Casual Vacancy) as Winston Churchill as he suffers a debilitating stroke.

The series is based on a true story and is directed by Charles Sturridge (Brideshead Revisited), Romola Garai (The Hour), and Lindsay Duncan (Sherlock), along with many others PBS fans will recognize.

It is an adaptation of Jonathan Smith’s KBO: The Churchill Secret (Little/Brown, U.K., not published in the US.)

Ithaca opens in limited release on the 9th, after a poorly reviewed run at film festivals. Giving a flavor for the critics take, The Hollywood Reporter said it was “almost a casebook study of how not to transpose “literature” to film … heartfelt yet sodden … wordy and static.”

Given its big name star line up, it might have expected a better reception. It is directed by Meg Ryan, written by Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers) and based on by William Saroyan’s 1943 novel The Human Comedy. It stars Alex Neustaedter, Jack Quaid, Meg Ryan, Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater and Tom Hanks.

There was no tie-in.

Originally scheduled for release on October 21, the film adaptation of the childrens fantasy, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, has been moved to a later release. It’s now scheduled for a limited release (10 cities, 20 theaters) on December 23  which still qualifies it for Oscar nominations, but just barely,  followed by a wide release January 6 (1,500 theaters).

Deadline notes that the earlier date was “a complete nightmare in regards to competition, and the pic’s new date gives it ample time to breathe and spur word-of-mouth during the year-end holidays and into 2017.”

The film will  premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10.

The third, most recent trailer was released in July.

Candlewick is releasing two tie-ins, including a hardcover “Special Collector’s Edition” that, in addition to the original illustrated YA novel, includes new essays by Ness, who worked on the screenplay, previously unpublished early sketches by illustrator Jim Kay and interviews with the director, cast, and crew.

A Monster Calls: Special Collectors’ Edition (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay, (Candlewick, October 4, 2016)

A Monster Calls: A Novel (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay (Candlewick, August 2, 2016, Trade Paperback)

BBC One is adapting a 2014 LibraryRead’s pick, Jessie Burton’s debut novel, The Miniaturist (HarperCollins/Ecco; HarperLuxe; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample), reports Deadline Hollywood.

The planned three-part mini-series is in the works for 2017. No specific start date or stars have yet been confirmed.

Burton’s book did very well in the UK. Radio Times reports it was “one of the fastest selling debut novels in a decade, shifting more than a million copies in 37 countries.” It won Waterstone’s Book of the Year (one of the UK’s biggest bookstore chains), the UK National Book Awards New Writer of the Year, the UK National Book Awards Overall Book of the Year, and The Observer‘s Book of the Year, which said “The writing is fluid and addictive and the story grows out of the most irritatingly brilliant idea imaginable.”

Burton said in a press release “It’s an almost indescribable thrill to know the characters and story I invented in The Miniaturist are going to be given a new life in such an exciting way. John Brownlow’s script is perfect. Short of actually being published, it’s the best news I’ve ever had.” (Brownlow wrote the screenplay for the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Ted and Sylvia, aka Sylvia).

Posting on Twitter Buton was less restrained.

Stateside, Entertainment Weekly gave the novel an A-, writing “The Miniaturist is one of the year’s most hyped novels, and it’s easy to see why.” The Wall Street Journal ran a feature on the book (subscription may be required). Kirkus gave it a starred review, writing “With its oblique storytelling, crescendo of female empowerment and wrenching ending, this novel establishes Burton as a fresh and impressive voice; book groups in particular will relish it.”

Need a refresher on the plot? Elizabeth Angelastro of Manlius Library, Manlius, NY provided the LibraryReads annotation:

“A dollhouse whose figures and furnishings foretell life events, mysterious notes, family secrets and the powerful guild and church of 1686 Amsterdam. All these elements combine for an engaging story of a young bride’s struggle to be the ‘architect of her own fortune.’”

The executive producer for the BBC show said to think of the novel as “Wolf Hall meets Tulip Fever.”

Kicking off the long holiday weekend, The Light Between Oceans opens on Sept. 2,  based on the best-selling phenomenon (nearly a year on the NYT hardcover list, it is still on the trade paperback list after 63 weeks), it stars Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender as a married couple who live in a remote lighthouse. When they discover a baby, they decide to keep her and raise her as their own. The tie-in edition, The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman (S&S/Scribner; HighBridge; OverDrive Sample; mass market), came out a few weeks ago.

There are few critical reviews yet, but Entertainment Weekly, reporting on an interview with the pair (who are a couple off screen) notes that they “fill their roles with incandescent grace notes.”

Also opening this Friday, but in a limited number of theaters is The 9th Life of Louis Drax,  A tie-in has just been released.

Rising on Amazon’s sales rankings is A Dog’s Purpose, by W. Bruce Cameron (Macmillan/Forge; Tantor Media; OverDrive Sample), jumping from just outside the top 300 to solidly in the top 20.

The rise coincides with the release of the tear-tearjerking first trailer for the film adaptation, starring Dennis Quaid, Britt Robertson, Josh Gad and Peggy Lipton (for those of you who remember the TV series Mod Squad, she was the star. For the rest of you, she is the mother of Rashida Jones).

About a dog named Bailey who comes back to life as many other dogs (remembering each of his past lives), the book was published in hardcover in 2010 and spent over a year on the New York Times hardcover and trade paperback best seller lists.

Cameron is the author of several other titles, including spin-offs of  A Dog’s Purpose. and 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, the basis for the ABC sitcom  (2002 -2005).

The film version opens on January 27, 2017.

Mass market and trade paperback tie-in editions will be released on Dec. 6.

A memoir of an amazing journey of loss and recovery, Saroo Brierley’s A Long Way Home, (PRH/Viking, 2014, trade paperback, 2015) is headed to the silver screen, starring Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, and David Wenham. They join a cast of actors well-known in India, including Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Priyanka Bose, and Tannishtha Chatterjee. The inspirational tear-jerker is directed by Garth Davis (Top of the Lake).

The Weinstein Company film, retitled Lion, will open nation wide on Nov. 25, the Friday after Thanksgiving, not only a prime time to attract families looking for entertainment, but also good timing for awards. Vanity Fair reports the film is “Already on Awards-Season Short Lists.”

In the book, Brierley recounts how he was separated from his family in rural India at age 4, when he climbed aboard a train and was carried over a thousand miles away to a city he did not know. He wound up in an orphanage, was adopted and relocated to Tasmania.

Interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered when the book was published, Brierley describes how he tried to find his way home by studying Google Earth looking for a familiar landscape — a river, a waterfall, and a fountain. He says the moment he finally found his mother “was like a nuclear fusion.”

The tie-in uses the film’s title, Lion, Saroo Brierley (PRH/Berkley; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Below is the recently released trailer, followed by Brierley giving a speech about his journey, and the NPR interview.

One of the most talked about literary novels of 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (RH/Doubleday; OverDrive Sample), may be headed to the small screen.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Scott Rudin, noted for his many literary adaptations,  and Joe Mantello (the theater director behind Wicked) have optioned screen rights. Of course, that is just the first step. Many book titles get optioned without ever making it onto a screen.

Yanagihara posted the news to the book’s Facebook page (the entire page seems to have mysteriously disappeared) and said that the project will be a limited series. Yanagihara also asked followers to suggest actors to play Jude. Responses, reports Flavorwire, include “Eddie Redmayne … Ezra Miller (!), Rami Malek (!!) and Ben Whishaw (!!!)”

Recent literary novels that have followed a similar path include HBO’s adaptation of Olive Kitteridge and Showtime’s Purity.

A Little Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and The National Book Awards, although it didn’t win either. It did capture readers and critics, becoming, as we noted, a holds superstar and a darling of reviewers. It also made multiple best of the year lists and won the Kirkus Prize.

Fall is on the way, as Entertainment Weekly‘s current double issue reminds us, with its previews of 104 major movie releases through December.

Many of those films, including the one on the cover,  had their beginnings as books, some with strong literary credentials, like Ang Lee’s adaptation of the  award winning Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk or major best seller status, like The Girl on the Train and The Light Between Oceans.

One of the most heavily anticipated movies, however is based on a lesser-known title, The Queen of Katwe (S&S/Scribner), the biography of an unlikely chess champion, a young girl from a poor family in Uganda. The Disney movie, directed by Mira Nair, is already being touted as a film to break through #OscarsSoWhite.

See our listings of upcoming adaptations, for the both big and small screens, as well as our complete listing of upcoming tie-ins.

Just one adaptation opens in the coming week but  it will not make much noise, since it opens in a limited number of theaters (also on VOD), which is unfortunate because it received strong reviews when it premiered at this year’s SXSW.

I Am Not a Serial Killer is based on the 2009 thriller of the same title by Dan Wells. The first in a series, it received a starred review from Kirkus, which called it a “gory gem …this deft mix of several genres features a completely believable teenage sociopath (with a heart of gold), dark humor, [and} a riveting mystery.” Other titles in the series received equally strong reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus.

The plot line is reminiscent of  another series, Dexter. In this case, the main character is a 15-year-old struggling with the realization that he exhibits the classic personality traits of a serial killer. As he fights his own tendencies, he uses his special knowledge to try to help solve a series of murders happening in his small town.

The movie stars Back to the Future‘s Christopher Lloyd and, as the main character, Max Records (Where the Wild Things Are).