Winner of this year’s Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, and a nominee for the National Book Awards in Young People’s Literature, Kate Milford’s middle grade novel Greenglass House ((HMH/Clarion; Recorded Books, 2014) may be on the road to the big screen.

Deadline reports that Paramount in final negotiations to acquire the rights, has assigned a producer and screenwriter and is considering breaking the story in to several parts, to create a film franchise.

On her web site, Milford says she’s very happy with the choices because,  “I really loved what the producer Ian [Bryce, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers: Age Of Extinction] told me about what he wanted the movie to be … He hit all the points that you’d want to hear someone hit if you’ve read Greenglass House and had strong feelings about it. In fact, it was immediately and overwhelmingly clear that he himself had read the book and had strong feelings about it, and I think the best thing an author can hope for in someone who’s going to shepherd their work to a new phase of being is that that person is as passionate about it as the author is, and that you have the same vision for the story you’re telling.”

Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2011; OverDrive Sample) is about to land in movie theaters (on Aug. 14) . It premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Festival.

Adapted by the team behind American Splendor, the film stars Ethan Hawke, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Emile Hirsch, and Emily Mortimer and is set in the hardcore punk scene of Manhattan during the late 80s, on the eve of the Tompkins Square Park riots.

Early reviews are mixed, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it “unassumingly strong” and Variety praising its tone and setting but questioning its selling power, “this warmly conceived dramedy will likely resonate strongest with audiences who have a direct connection to the story’s place and time. Otherwise, there’s not much to suggest a theatrical windfall.”

The NPR’s review of the novel deemed it “a sad, funny…bittersweet, lovely book.” Based on the trailer, that tone seems to have carried over to the movie with its music, inter-generational dialogue, and teenage angst.

HarperCollins releases a movie-tie in edition next month:

Ten Thousand Saints MTI
Eleanor Henderson
HarperCollins/Ecco; July 28, 2015; Paperback
9780062428691, 0062428691
$15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD

In a bit of an understatement, the Hollywood trade Deadline notes “[John] Green’s young-adult allure has made him as bankable an author as there is right now.”

Just last week it was announced that a film adaptation of a collection of three linked short stories, one of them by Green, Let It Snow (Penguin/Speak, pbk original, 2008), will be released on Dec. 9, 2016.

Another Green title has just taken a step closer to the screen. Director Rebecca Thomas is in talks for Looking For Alaska.

And, of course, Paper Towns, starring  Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne is set to open in less than a month, on July 24.

So, what about his other books?

On his web site, Green says that An Abundance of Katherines, has been optioned, but is “a long way off.”

That leaves just Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which he wrote with David Leviathan. It hasn’t been optioned, says Green, because,”To quote a real live movie producer who really said this about Will Grayson, Will Grayson, ‘The only thing Hollywood hates more than smart teenagers is smart, gay teenagers’ I hope Hollywood will prove this movie producer wrong someday.”

Green has helped Hollywood get over that first objection. He may conquer the second as well.

The 13-episode series Zoo, based on the novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge premieres on CBS at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, June 30. Entertainment Weekly gives is a solid B and calls it a ‘”worthy small screen supplement to a  Jurassic World summer.”

Tie-ins:

Zoo

James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Hachette/Grand Central, May 26, 2015
Trade Paperback, $15.00 USD, $17.00 CAD
Mass Market, $8.00 USD, $9.00 CAD
Debuting in theaters is Big Game, starring Samuel L. Jackson, playing the President of the U.S. in a role the New York Post calls the actor’s “campiest outing since Snakes on a Plane.” It is based on Big Game Daniel Smith, , (Scholastic/Chicken House)

It doesn’t have a director or cast yet, but that hasn’t stopped Universal Pictures from announcing that it will release Let It Snow on Dec. 9, 2016.

The film is based on a collection of three linked short stories by Maureen Johnson, John Green and Lauren Myracle (Penguin/Speak, pbk original, 2008), all of which take place on the same day during a snow storm.

Faith-based movies and tv shows have become significant money makers, so much so that the Hollywood trade publication Variety sponsors an event titled “PURPOSE: The Family Entertainment & Faith-Based Summit.”

One of the keynote speakers this year will be David Oyelowo, who starred as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. According to Variety, he is a devout Christian, who only takes roles that reflect well on his beliefs.

In the upcoming movie Captive, he plays the real-life Brian Nichols, an escaped convict who murdered four people and took Ashley Smith as hostage in the process. By reading to Nichols from Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life, (Zondervan,2002), Ashley (played by Kate Mara) managed to talk Nichols into turning himself in. She then wrote an account of the experience, Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story Of The Atlanta Hostage Hero (HarperCollins/Zondervan, 2005), on which the movie is based.

The movie is being released by Paramount on 9/18/2015. The trailer was just released:

Tie-in:

Captive : The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero
Ashley Smith
HarperCollins/Morrow: August 18, 2015
Paperback, $14.99 USD, $18.50 CAD

But the book that may get the biggest boost  from the movie. is The Purpose Driven Life,

Based on the extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell, often called “the female Lawrence of Arabia,” the international trailer has been released for Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert, leading up to its opening in Germany this fall (no U.S. release date has been announced).

The movie stars Nicole Kidman as Bell, with Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence. Also starring are James Franco and Damian Lewis.

Reviews were not kind when it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. IndieWire ‘s headline stated unequivocally that it’s “Werner Herzog’s Worst Movie in Years” and Variety complained, “Herzog has seldom been accused of subtlety, but this particular narrative is actually so understated, it will have to be handled as a specialty title in most territories.”

The movie is not based on a specific title, but several recent bios of Bell are available, as well as her own writings. Penguin is releasing a collection in August that refers to the movie:

A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert

Gertrude Bell, Georgina Howell (Edited by), Georgina Howell (Introduction by)
Penguin Classics: August 11, 2015
USD, $19.00 CAD, £9.99

The youngest Nobel Prize winner in history, Malala Yousafzai is the subject of the documentary He Named Me Malala, directed by Davis Guggenheim who won an Oscar for another documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The film will debut on October 2nd. The trailer was just released.

It debuted on The Daily Show.with Jon Stewart on Thursday night.

 I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban was published in 2013 (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio).

It was also published in an edition for younger readers, I Am Malala : How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition), Malala Yousafzai, Patricia McCormick (Hachette/Little, Brown Young Readers, 2014).

The second adaptation of a Gillian Flynn novel, after Gone Girl, arrives in theaters on  August 7. Based on Dark Places, it was filmed at the same time as Gone Girl. Both films were originally scheduled to to be released last fall.

Premiering in France earlier this year, it has a lot going for it, including the major success of Gone Girl, and an A-list cast featuring Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Chloe Grace Moretz as well as Christina Hendricks, on screen for the first time since the ending of Mad Men.

However, trade reviews were not kind (The Hollywood Reporter was mixed but Variety was decidedly negative).

A second, U.S. trailer has just been released:

Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, is being adapted as a TV series. The author, who has a developed a career in Hollywood, is now at work on an original script with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen

Tie-in:

Dark Places (Movie Tie-In Edition)
Gillian Flynn
RH/Broadway: June 2, 2015
9780553418484, 0553418483
Trade Paperback
$14.00 USD, $17.00 CAD

The 10-episode series The Astronaut Wives Club, debuts on ABC tonight. Based on Lily Koppel’s book of the same title about the wives of of the first U.S. astronauts (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio and Large Print), unfortunately, it does not seem to have lift-off.

The New York Times review dismisses it saying it does the women a “disservice by sugarcoating them almost as much as NASA did some 50 years ago.” The L.A. Times damns it with faint praise, “it is not the worst way to spend an idle hour on a summer night.”

The cover of the book, above left, features the actual wives. They were profiled on CBS Sunday Morning when the book was published in 2013. Next to it, the poster for the series, featuring the wives as portrayed by JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Yvonne Strahovski, Dominique McElligott, Odette Annable, Erin Cummings, Azure Parsons and Zoe Boyle.

Extended sneak peek, below.

If you were wandering the streets of Queens yesterday, you may have seen a production crew at work on ABC’s limited TV series, Madoff, based on The Madoff Chronicles by Brian Ross (Hyperion, 2009). The subject of the series, Bernie Madoff, now incarcerated for developing an infamous Ponzi scheme, was born in Queens.

Starring Richard Dreyfuss as Madoff and Blythe Danner as his wife Ruth, new cast members Charles Grodin and Lewis Black joined this week.

No release date has been announced, but in November the Disney Book Group plans to release a new paperback version that “will serve as a tie to the ABC drama starring Richard Dreyfuss.” (it and other tie-ins are listed in our Upcoming Movie and TV Tie-ins).

The Madoff Chronicles (Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth)
Brian Ross
Disney Book Group/Kingswell; November 10, 2015
Paperback; $14.99 USD, $16.50 CAD

HBO has also had a competing product in the works, a movie starring Robert De Niro as Madoff. Announced in 2011, a new screenwriter was assigned in late 2013, In February of this year, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg, it was still in development

De Niro talked about prepping for the role in an interview with Bloomberg in April 2013:

The De Niroa project is based on two books:

Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family by Laurie Sandell (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2011), based on interviews with Madoff’s family.

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques (Macmillan/ St. Martins; Tantor Audio, 2011)

After several years, and changes in both production companies and networks, the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s award-winning novel, American Gods, (HarperCollins/Morrow) is now officially green lighted to run on the Starz cable network.

Gaiman, quoted in The Hollywood Reporter, says “Now we finally move to the exciting business that fans have been doing for the last dozen years: casting our Shadow, our Wednesday, our Laura …”

The book moved up Amazon’s sales rankings to #240 (from #1,633) on the news.

Coming November 6th is The Peanuts Movie (in 3-D, of course. There’s a certain irony in that, since the original comics were decidedly 2-D). The second trailer has just been released.

Several tie-ins, including a novelization are on their way (for a full list, check our Upcoming Tie-ins catalog on Edelweiss):

Peanuts Movie Novelization
Charles M. Schulz, Tracey West (Adapted by)
September 22, 2015; Trade Paperback
Juvenile Fiction \ Media Tie-In
Ages 8 to 12, Grades 3 to 7

First the buzz, then the questions about accuracy and now the possible movie.

After a competitive auction, according to The Hollywood Reporter, MGM has won the film rights to the recently published Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin (Simon & Schuster; ebook, 9781476762722).

It hit the NYT Combined Nonfiction Best Sellers list at #2 this week.

The trailer for the film adaptation of The Martian by Andy Weir, (RH/Crown) debuted online this week.

Scheduled for release on November 25 [Update: just a few days after we posted this story, 20th Century Fox switched the release date to Oct. 2. The logic? Less competition, according to Deadline ]. Directed by Ridley Scott, it has a killer cast, including Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Donald Glover.

The book began as a self-published science fiction title, later picked up by Random House’s Crown imprint. It appeared on multiple best books lists, was a Feb. 2014 LibraryReads pick, the 2014 RUSA Reading List selection for  Science Fiction, as well as an Alex Award winner.

A tie-in is scheduled for October.

The Martian (Mass Market MTI)
Andy Weir
RH/Broadway; October 13, 2015
Mass Market; $9.99 USD, $12.99 CAD
9781101905005, 110190500X