“Mary Downing Hahn is the Stephen King of late middle grade fiction. Her haunting chilling tales are just right for those 4th graders who have outgrown Goosebumps and sophisticated enough to surprise the most jaded 7th grader,” says EarlyWord Kids Correspondent, Lisa Von Drasek.

A former school librarian from Maryland, Hahn has written dozens of novels for young readers.  Wait Till Helen Comes, (HMH Books for Young Readers; Brilliance Audio), has been continuously in print since 1986 and is now set for its screen debut, reports Variety. Maria Bello will star, with sisters Sophie Nelisse (The Book Thief) and Isabelle Nelisse (Mama). Shooting is set to begin at the end of the month in Winnipeg, Canada.

In March 2012, right after Silver Linings Playbook wrapped, stars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper joined forces again for another book adaptation, Serena, based on the novel by Ron Rash, (HarperCollins/Ecco, 2008).

Over two years later, the movie has yet to be released, even though Lawrence has since become a major star via The Hunger Games and the Lawrence/Cooper combo proved to be magic in both Silver Linings and the subsequent American Hustle.

A spokesperson for the production company has said not to worry, however, the delay is simply a result of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s perfectionism. The L.A. Times takes that with a grain of salt, “Bier took a year and a half to complete the film, and protracted productions rarely bode well for the final product.”

It is finally set to premiere at the BFI London Film Festival next month and will open in the U.K. on Oct. 24. Magnolia Pictures has the U.S. distribution rights, but doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, planning to release it “sometime next year.”

At this point, a movie based on another book by Rash, The World Made Straight, (Macmillan/Holt, 2006), which was shot a year later, may beat it. It’s scheduled for release some time in February.

Meanwhile, a trailer has just been released:

Tie-in:

Rash’s next novel, Above the Waterfall, (HarperCollins/Ecco) is scheduled for publication next year.

Oscar predictions are in rolling in for Julianne Moore’s starring role in the film adaptation of Still Alice by Lisa Genova (S&S/Gallery, 2009). Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Moore is lauded for her understated portrayal of a woman dealing with early onset Alzheimers.

Variety praises the directors for refusing “to milk the family’s situation for easy tears. Instead, the idea is to put us inside Alice’s head. We experience disorientation as she would, suggested by a shallow depth of field where things shown out of focus appear to be just beyond her comprehension.”

The Hollywood Reporter acknowledges that some might be put off by the subject, but that “word of mouth should provide the strongest incentive for audiences leery of the topic.”

Also starring in the film are Alec Baldwin as Alice’s husband with Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish as their three grown children.

No clips are available yet and a theatrical release has not yet been announced.

The book, originally self-published through iUniverse, was picked up by Simon and Schuster and went on to a long run on the New York Times trade paperback best seller list. Genova, a neuroscientist, has published two novels since, both dealing with brain disorders. Left Neglected is about the results of a brain injury and Love Anthony, about autism,. Her next book, Inside the O’Briens, (S&S/Gallery” S&S Audio, 4/7/14) is about a man dealing with Huntington’s Disease.

The film adaptation of John Green’s Paper Towns already has a release date, July 31, 2015. Now it has a director, as Green announced on Twitter last week.

It will be Jake Schrieber’s second feature film, after Robot & Frank.

Nat Wolff, who had the supporting role of Isaac in The Fault in Our Stars, will play Paper Town‘s lead, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. Green will act as executive producer. Love interest Margo has not yet been cast.

Books are big this fall, at least on movie screens. As USA Today notes, in a feature headlined, “Hollywood Hits The Books Hard This Fall,” over two dozen book adaptations will arrive in September and October. By our count, over a dozen more arrive by the end of the year (see our listing and check on the links to the right of this page for trailers).

Which adaptations will cause the books to rise? Judging from USA Today‘s own best seller list, it doesn’t matter how well the films are received. Both The Book Thief and The Giver were regarded as box office failures, but the books they were based on enjoyed unprecedented success. In many cases, the marketing of a movie alone can make the book soar, as in the case of The Maze Runner, which has been steadily rising on best seller lists, weeks in advance of the movie’s Sept. 19 release. It seems that name recognition is key; like the old adage about how to make $2 million, more success comes to those books that have had it already.

To help you prepare for the fall onslaught, we’ve created an Edelweiss collection of over 70 tie-ins to upcoming movies & TV.

It contains plenty of titles with major name recognition, led by Gone Girl and Unbroken, and, of course, Mockingjay, all of which continue to be such big sellers that we may not even notice a bump from the movies.  Attention will also return to previous long-running best sellers Wild, American Sniper and Before I Go to Sleep, and we expect HBO’s Olive Kitteridge to remind people that they meant to read Elizabeth’s Strout’s book when it won a Pulitzer.

Among kids tie-ins, however, a relative unknown may dominate. The team behind Disney’s phenomenon Frozen has created Big Hero 6, releasing in November, based on a Marvel comic series that is no longer in print. Many tie-ins, however, are coming from Random House/Disney. Hachette’s Yen imprint made a stir this week when they announced they will publish an English-language version of the Kodansha manga series, Haruki Ueno’s Baymax, which features the robot from the movie.

Come Christmas, we look to the more familiar, as a new incarnation of Paddington hits the screens (sorry, he is not voiced by Colin Firth who was deemed too “mature” for the part).

Later this month, we’ll see if the Boxtrolls brings more readers to Alan Snow’s nearly 550-page book, Here Be Monsters! (Atheneum, 2008, rereleased 8/5/14), or if attention will be focused on the much short tie ins.

Happy ordering.

With the release of the first trailer for the movie Rosewater,  we now have a glimpse of what Jon Stewart was up to when he went on hiatus from the Daily Show last summer to direct his first movie.

The movie is based on a book Then They Came For Me by Maziar Bahari, (Random House, 2011; Tantor Audio), the author’s account of his imprisionment in Iran, in part because of a Daily Show piece.

Variety gives the film a rave:

“The punishing ordeal of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari — imprisoned for 118 days on charges of espionage — is brought to the screen with impressive tact and intelligence by writer-director Jon Stewart in Rosewater, an alternately somber and darkly funny drama that may occupy the same geographic terrain as Argo (to which it will inevitably be compared), but in most other respects could hardly be more different.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s reviewer, however, is not so impressed, saying, “if this very same film had been made by an unknown director, it would pass in the night with only scant notice.”

The tables are now being turned on Stewart, as he begins to promote his own film. The Hollywood Reporter is his first stop, with a cover interview (too bad about that review). On his own show on Thursday night, he presented two new clips.

The movie opens in theaters on Nov. 7.

Tie-in:

Rosewater: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival
Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy, Jon Meacham (Foreword by)
Random House Trade Paperbacks October 21, 2014

Jeff Bridges’s long-awaited adaptation of The Giver is considered a flop by Hollywood standards, but it’s a huge success by publishing standards, causing the book to soar to #2 on the USA Today‘s Best Selling Books list, its highest spot to date.

What does this portend for the next big dystopian adaptation, The Maze Runner, based on the the book by James Dashner? Variety is already predicting that it will be a hit when it opens on Sept. 19. The book is currently #4 on USA Today‘s list, also its highest spot to date.

Meanwhile, one of the much-touted “grounded” Y.A. movies (translation: no expensive special effects required),  If I Stay, had a solid beginning at the box office last weekend. It is also brought a major boost to book sales. It is #1 on the USA Today list, followed close behind by the sequel, Where She Went, at #6.

Amidst all this discussion of what works in adaptations and what doesn’t, the second trailer for another long-delayed YA adaptation, starring Bridges was just released. Seventh Son, opening in February, is based on The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch by Joseph Delaney (HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 2005). Set in the 1700’s, it co-stars Julianne Moore as Mother Malkin, “the most evil witch in the world” with Bridges as the mentor to a young apprentice played by Ben Barnes.

Tie-in:

The Last Apprentice: Seventh Son: Book 1 and Book 2

Joseph Delaney

(HarperCollins/Greenwillow; December 23, 2014

Paperback; $9.99 USD / $11.99 CAD

One of many editions of the classic, this one with an intro. by
Neil Gaiman
(RH Young Readers)

There’s been a few film adaptations of  Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 collection of stories, The Jungle Book over the years.  Two new ones are in the works and are set to arrive in theaters within a year of each other.

The Disney version, scheduled for release Oct 15 next year, has most of the cast in place and is ready to begin production.

There’s been little news about the Warner Bros. version, titled Jungle Book: Origins, to be released on Oct 12, 2016, until now. The Hollywood Reporter announces the first cast member, Benedict Cumberbatch is in place, indicating that it is moving forward as well.

Cumberbatch will be the voice of the villain Shere Khan, a man-eating tiger. In the Disney version, directed by Jon Favreau, he is set to be voiced by Idris Elba. Entertainment Tonight has fun doing a face-off between the two, but you could go even further. How about a face-off with the gravelly malevolent voice of  George Sanders (who was Shere Khan In Disney’s 1967 version) or with Bombay, the actual Bengal tiger in Disney’s 1994 live-action version?

UPDATE: A few hours after we finished this story, more cast members were announced for the Warner Bros. version, so now you can enjoy and even larger face-off.

Mowgli
Warner: Rohan Chand (Bad Words star)
vs.
Disney:  newcomer, Neel Sethi

Shere Khan, the man-eating tiger
Warner: Benedict Cumberbatch
vs.
Disney:  Idris Elba

Baloo, the bear
Warner: Andy Serkis (the film’s director)
vs.
Disney:  Bill Murray

Kaa, the python
Warner: Cate Blanchett
vs.
Disney:  Scarlett Johansson

Bagheera, the panther
Warner: Christian Bale
vs.
Disney:  Ben Kingsley

Things are moving quickly for the film adaptation of Patrick Ness’s Y.A. novel, A Monster Calls, (illus. by Jim Kay, Candlewick, 2011).

The Hollywood Reporter announces that Sigourney Weaver has just oined the cast. Focus Features bought the rights to the book in March and shortly after set a release date of Oct. 14, 2016.

About a 13-year boy, Conor, who is dealing with his mother’s death, bullying at school, and then a monster in his back yard, Ness wrote it based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could complete the project (read Ness’s tribute to her in a sample from OverDrive).

Ness, who wrote the screenplay, and illustrator Jim Kay went on to win Britain’s Carnegie and Greenaway Medals for the book.

Weaver will play the boy’s grandmother, Felicity Jones his mother and Liam Neeson, the monster. The crucial role of Conor has not been cast yet.

It was going to be a fall that featured two major adaptations of Gillian Flynn novels.

Gone Girl, which arrives in theaters on Oct 3, is the focus of  Entertainment Weekly‘s Fall Movie Preview (full story only available by subscription).

But the other adaptation, Dark Places, with an A-list cast headed by Charlize Theron, is nowhere to be found in the issue.

Originally scheduled for Sept. 1, that date has since disappeared from IMDb (if you’re headed to Norway in November, however, you can catch it there). The release of the movie tie-in has also been postponed, so we have to assume the movie is being held as well.

Meanwhile, as we noted earlier, Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, is being adapted as a TV series.

Gone Girl director David Fincher upset fans earlier this year when he seemed to imply to Entertainment Weekly that the movie’s final act will different from the book’s. In the new issue, he claims the quote was taken out of context. When asked to clarify if anything has been changed, he says, “Everything and nothing … But at its core, it’s exactly what I think Gillian always intended” (see if you can make sense of the full quote here).

Jeff Bridges’s long road to his dream of adapting Lois Lowry’s seminal YA dystopian novel, The Giver (HMH, 1993; winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal) has finally become reality. The movie premiered this week, amid a massive amount of publicity, and opens in theaters tomorrow.

The Huffington Post proclaims that “The Giver Movie Is Quite Different From The Book You Remember … ” while on NPR station WBUR, the author herself says The Giver Stays True To Spirit Of Her Book, and also tells the Washington Post that the cast elevated her original novel.

Good news for that novel, it’s at #3 on the new USA Today best seller list, the highest ever for the book.

From the photos at the premiere, it seems that Lowry was having the most fun of anyone there.

EarlyWord Kids Correspondent, Lisa Von Drasek, got to see an early screening and calls the movie “spectacular.” Joining her for the screening was Kate DiCamillo (two time Newbery winner and National Ambassador for Children’s Literature), who said,

“The Giver is a triumph for book-lovers and movie-goers. It is a movie that reminds us of the power of memory and books and stories and love. It shows us the privilege and the pain and joy of being alive, fully human.”

DreamWorks has announced that filming will begin in New Zealand and Australia next month for the long-running 2012 world-of-mouth best seller, The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman’s debut novel, (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; Thorndike; trade pbk, 2013).

Starring in a role that, according to Deadline the “brightest young actresses … [were] trying for,”  is Swedish actress, Alicia Vikander. Just 25 years old, she has already appeared in several book-to-movie adaptations.  In 2012, she starred in A Royal Affair, based on the novel by Danish writer Bodil Steensen-Leth and had a supporting role in Anna Karenina. Upcoming, she will appear in Seventh Son, (based on the Joseph Delaney novels, opening in Feb), and star as Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth. She will also star in Tulip Fever, as well as in The Danish Girl.

Also starring in The Light Between Oceans, directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) are Michael Fassbender, and Rachel Weisz.

Other recent movie news, below (check our Books to Movies & TV spreadsheet for a complete listing of upcoming adaptations):

American Sniper — release date set for 12/25/14 – Based on Chris Kyle,’s American Sniper, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2012), directed by Clint Eastwood, it stars Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller and Luke Grimes. It will probably not include the book’s passages about Jesse Ventura.

5th Wave — Maika Monroe to play Ringer — Based on Ricy Yancey’s The 5Th Wave, (Penguin/Putnam Juvenile, 2013), directed by J Blakeson, it stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Alex Roe, Maika Monroe with Liev Schreiber in negotiations to play the villain. Scheduled for release 1/29/16.

Mortdecai — Trailer released  — Based on Kyril Bonfiglioli’s darkly comic detective books, the Charlie Mortdecai series, (published in the U.S. as The Mortdecai Trilogy, Overlook, 1991), it is directed by David Koepp, stars Johnny Depp, Ewan McGregor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Olivia Munn and Paul Bettany and is scheduled for release on 2/6/2015.

The Sound and the Fury — To debut at the Venice film festival next month, based on the 1929 classic by William Faulkner, it is directed by James Franco, and stars Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride (no, they’re not playing it as a comedy).

Following in the footsteps of Gillian Flynn, author Liane Moriarty has been discovered by Hollywood. Three of her six novels are now in development.

Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon’s production companies just joined forces to option her latest, Big Little Lies, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio; Recorded Books; Thorndike). Released last week, it got a prepub rave from the NYT‘s Janet Maslin, followed by another stellar review in the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, given that her previous title, The Husband’s Secret, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn, 2013), only recently began dropping on best seller lists, it arrives at #3 on today’s USA Today list.

Both actress/producers seem to have developed a taste for domestic thrillers. Kidman stars in Before I Go to Sleep, opening Sept. 12, based on the novel by S.J. Watson (Harper, 2011). She’s also bought the rights to The Silent Wife, by A. S. A. Harrison (Penguin original trade pbk, 2013). Witherspoon is a producer for Gone Girl, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (RH/Crown, 2012), which releases on Oct. 2

It may be a race to see which Moriarty title makes it to the screen first. What Alice Forgot, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn, 2011) is in development, with David Frankel attached as director. Also in development, but with no director attached as yet, is The Husband’s Secret to be produced by CBS Films.

Moriarty talks about The Husband’s Secret below (the video was produced by the author’s U.K. publisher and therefore features the U.K. cover):

We’re trying desperately to avoid all the “back from the dead” cliches, but there’s proof that we’ve fallen prey to them in the past.

After several years in development, with multiple actresses announced for the lead (Natalie Portman — who is still attached as a producer — Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Mia Wasikowska and Rooney Mara), the adaptation of the godmother of the mashup genre, Pride Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books, 2009) is set to begin filming in September, with Lily James as Elizabeth Bennett, Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy and Bella Heathcote as Elizabeth’s sister. The box office disaster of that other mashup adaptation, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, put the studios off for a while, but now it seems that the success of various zombie vehicles have made them forget all that.

Below are some other book-to-movie projects that are getting new life:

Philip Roth, American Pastoral, (Houghton Mifflin, 1997) — to begin filming in Pittsburgh in March, starring Ewan McGregor and Jennifer Connelly.

Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang, (HarperCollins/ Ecco, 2011) — finally filming, as proven by shots of Nicole Kidman on the set.

Maziar Bahari, Then They Came For Me, (Random House, 2011) — Jon Stewart took a hiatus last year to direct this adaptation, titled Rosewater. The release date is now set for 11/7/2014.

Joe Hill,  Horns, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2010) — U.S. release date of 10/31/2014 finally announced (it hit theaters in the U.K. last year), sending the book up Amazon’s sales ranking.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, (1871) — titled Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to the 2010 live-action Alice in Wonderland, is currently filming and scheduled for release on 5/27/2016, with returning cast, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and Mia Wasikowska as Alice Kingsleigh, as well as new actors, Sacha Baron Cohen as Time, Rhys Ifans as the Mad Hatter’s father and Ed Speelers as James Harcourt.

For more on upcoming adaptations, check our spreadsheet, EarlyWord, Books to Movies (download and sort by date for the latest stories).

The 1963 Newbery Award winner, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle (Macmillan/FSG BYR) is set for a new adaptation. Disney just announced that Jennifer Lee who wrote and co-directed the animated mega-hit, Frozen, will write the adaptation.

The book was adapted previously as a TV movie, to middling success. In an interview with Newsweek, L’Engle was asked if the film “met her expectations.”

She replied, “Yes, I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

The interview was conducted when L’Engle was 85, and therefore felt she could “say what I want” and she did, letting loose on fundamentalists and saying of the Harry Potter series, “I read one of them. It’s a nice story but there’s nothing underneath it.”

Another children’s classic is getting a new look. Universal is adapting Clifford The Big Red Dog by Norman Bridwell (Scholastic, 1963) as a live-actio, 3D movie, scheduled for release on April 8, 2016. It was loosely adapted in 2004 as the animated Clifford’s Really Big Movie and as a PBS series.

Universal also announced that they have bought the rights to the best selling picture book, The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt, (Penguin/Philomel, 2013).