The director and stars of the Disney adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s book,  A Wrinkle In Time. exuberantly high-fivied each other on social media over the weekend to celebrate the end of filming. Entertainment Weekly lists the well-wishes and selfies.

Oscar-nominated Ava DuVernay (Selma) directs the project. She is the first black woman to do so for a $100 million dollar studio feature, reports the magazine, and only “the fourth female director to have helmed a live-action movie with a budget of over $100 million, joining the ranks of Kathryn Bigelow (2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker), Lana Wachowski (2012’s Cloud Atlas, 2015’s Jupiter Ascending), and Patty Jenkins (this year’s Wonder Woman).”

The film stars Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. Storm Reid (12 Years a Slave), described by Entertainment Weekly as an “up-and-coming actress,” stars as Meg Murry. Levi Miller, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Bellamy Young, Will McCormack, and Zach Galifianakis each have supporting roles. The screenplay is by Academy Award-winning Jennifer Lee (Frozen).

The film is currently scheduled to premiere April 6, 2018. Tie-in editions, in hardcover and trade paperback, arrive this November.

The 1963 Newbery Award winner, A Wrinkle in Time  (Macmillan/FSG BYR) was previously adapted by Disney as a TV movie.

Disney has had success revising earlier adaptations for a new era, remaking The Jungle Book and Cinderella to critical praise.

Relatively few adaptations are currently in theaters, but this weekend sees the opening of one of biggest of the season, the live-action version of one of Disney’s most beloved animated films, Beauty and the Beast, which in turn is based on the Grimm fairy tale. It’s another reminder that one of the fiercest copyright enforcers takes full advantage of public domain material.

The film stars Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast. Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson also star.

Press coverage has been heavy with features in Entertainment Weekly and a Vanity Fair shoot for Watson.

Reviews range from praise to pans. USA Today says “Here’s some Disney magic for you: The new Beauty and the Beast actually improves upon the animated classic.”

The NYT says “Its classicism feels unforced and fresh. Its romance neither winks nor panders. It looks good, moves gracefully and leaves a clean and invigorating aftertaste. I almost didn’t recognize the flavor: I think the name for it is joy.”

Entertainment Weekly is not as glowing, giving it a B- and writing “It’s fine and funny and sweet and lush and some of the songs are infectious, but I still don’t completely understand why it exists — and why they couldn’t do more with it.” New York Magazine calls it “Lifeless.”

There are multiple tie-ins, including Beauty and the Beast Novelization, Disney Writers (Hachette/Disney Press). For more see the listing of tie-ins.

Another film that captured the imagination of a generation, although in a quite different way, is also getting a second pass at the silver screen. T2 Trainspotting opens on March 17.

The original 1996 film Trainspotting “epitomize[d] an era” says the LA Times. “The film captured the growing consumerism, heroin-chic and Cool Britannia of the time … As it followed the exploits of Renton, Sick Boy and other on-the-margin types in Edinburgh, Scotland … [it] took on landmark status.”

The original cast stars again, including Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald. Director and screenwriter return as well, Danny Boyle and John Hodge.

Both films are based on novels by Irvine Welsh: his debut novel, Trainspotting (Norton, 1996; OverDrive Sample), and its sequel, Porno (Norton, 2003; OverDrive Sample). Norton released the new film tie-in, on March 7: T2 Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh. The cover says “Previously published as Porno.”

However, the book connections are a bit complicated. The NYT says “Although the second film uses elements from Porno … Mr. Boyle said the story was largely a development of ideas from the original book.”

Thus far reviews are mixed. Neither the Hollywood Reporter nor Variety are impressed. THR says “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” and calls the film “disappointingly redundant.” Variety says “a shinily distracting but disappointingly unambitious follow-up to 1996’s feverish youthquake of a junkie study, which reunites its quartet of older, none-the-wiser Edinburgh wretches to say simply this: Middle-aged masculinity is a drag, whether you’re on smack or off it.”

The Guardian disagrees, calling it “a vibrant and welcome reunion.”

Hap and Leonard, Season 2 returns to Sundance TV on March 15 in a six-episode run.

Based on the books by Joe R. Lansdale the second season will draw on events from the second novel of the print series, Mucho Mojo (PRH/Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2009;Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Stars James Purefoy, as Hap, and Michael Kenneth Williams, as Leonard, return.

Entertainment Weekly says the show, which has a notoriously high body count, has “reinforced [Season 2] with a number of new actors, including Brian Dennehy as a lawman named Valentine Otis, Irma P. Hall as local matriarch MeMaw, Dohn Norwood as charismatic preacher Reverend Fitzgerald, Cranston Johnson as Detective Johnson, and Tiffany Mack as Leonard’s lawyer, Florida Grange, who, together with Hap, attempts to clear Leonard’s name after he is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit.”

Deadline Hollywood reports the first season was “the network’s highest-rated original series.”

There is no tie-in.

Add Kerry Washington to the list of Hollywood women seeing the possibilities in book adaptations. Variety reports she will produce the planned Warner Bros. feature based on Brit Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers (PRH/Riverhead; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample). Bennett is on board to write the screenplay and will serve as an executive producer.

The Mothers was a LibraryReads selection for October 2016. Jennifer Ohzourk, St. Louis Public Library, St. Louis, MO wrote the annotation:

“In a contemporary Black community in California, the story begins with a secret. Nadia is a high school senior, mourning her mother’s recent death, and smitten with the local pastor’s son, Luke. It’s not a serious romance, but it takes a turn when a pregnancy (and subsequent cover-up) happen. The impact sends ripples through the community. The Mothers asks us to contemplate how our decisions shape our lives. The collective voice of the Mothers in the community is a voice unto itself, narrating and guiding the reader through the story.”

Bennett made waves last year and was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 authors for 2016. Her novel was a NYT bestseller for two weeks, starting in late October 2016 where it debuted at #18. It did better and stayed longer on the LA Times list, where it rose to #7 and lasted six non-consecutive weeks.

Bestseller performance aside, it was a literary hit, getting critical attention, glowing reviews, and several best book nods. It was also a Librarian Favorite of 2016, making the top 7 picks.

Kerry, known for her portrayal of the take-no-prisoners Olivia Pope in the hit TV show Scandal, is on the path to becoming “a Producing Powerhouse” wrote Vanity Fair last year, pointing out that she was the executive producer for HBO’s Confirmation. She also starred in the series, earring nominations for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe award.

The studio optioned the book just recently, so it will be a while before plans firm up, but naming the high-profile Washington to the project is a major step.

Stephen King’s horror classic IT is getting closer to its release date, one of them, that is.

The 1986 story that made a generation terrified of clowns is being made into a 2-part movie.

Part one follows a group of teenagers, members of the Losers’ Club, who live in a small town in Maine and fight against an ancient and shape-shifting evil that terrorizes the town every 27 years. Part one of the film version follows those kids. It releases on September 8, 2017.

King, never shy about sharing his views on adaptations of his movies (he famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining), let it be known that he was happy with what he has seen so far. His message board now has a post reading that “he saw a screening of IT today and wanted to let everybody know that they should stop worrying about it as the producers have done a wonderful job with the production.”

Part two will follow those same terrorized teens as adults, as they once again stand guard against the recurring evil of It. Filming is about to begin, a surprise to the film fan site BloodyDisgusting  , which thought the studio would wait to see how well part one does, “We figured cameras wouldn’t start rolling unless/until box office numbers came in, but it seems we were quite wrong about that … filming will begin March 17, 2017 on the second film, under the secret title Accordion.”

Andrés Muschietti (Mama) is directing and Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård plays the evil clown Pennywise. One of the producers is Seth Grahame-Smith, known for launching the mashup craze with his books Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

The producers were clearly holding their breath for King’s reaction. Muschietti posted on Instagram, “Not a humblebrag. A brag! Mr King, you had us at ‘stop worrying’.”

Entertainment Weekly posted a creepy picture of Pennywise, calling the character a “bloodthirsty jokester — just one incarnation of a shape-shifting evil that feeds on fear, misery, and the occasional child.”

A mass market tie-in edition, It (MTI): A Novel, Stephen King (Pocket/S&S), comes out on July 25, 2017. Cover art has yet to be released.

The film Arrival was nominated for eight Oscar awards but nabbed just one, for Sound Editing. However, clips from the film, shown during the Academy Awards show, served to prime audiences for the film’s On Demand debut on Saturday.

In turn, the the collection that included the short story it is based on, Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang (originally published in 2002 by Macmillan/Tor; re-released by PRH/Vintage in 2016; Tantor Audio; OverDrive Sample) is moving up Amazon’s sales ranking again. Demand is also strong in libraries we checked, with most systems topping 4:1 ratios.

This marks a second wave of interest in the collection, after the film’s release in November, when the paperback appeared on the NYT Best Seller List for several weeks.

The formerly under-the-radar Science Fiction writer has since received a even more attention. Wired picked the collection last month for their book club, saying the lead story is so moving that it made participating staff members cry in public.

The New Yorker featured Chiang in January and Syfy Wire published an interview in the lead up to the Oscars.

Benedict Cumberbatch will star, reports Deadline Hollywood, in a new five-episode limited series for Showtime called Melrose, based on a series of novels by Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last.

David Nicholls, author of the best seller One Day and screenwriter for the subsequent film, is writing the adaptations and Cumberbatch will executive produce.

Each episode will be based on one of the novels which The Atlantic has called “short, remarkably compressed … (most take place in just 24 hours or so).” The 2014 roundup review begins with a summary that Hollywood could lift, “Imagine a family like the Downton Abbey clan gone bad.”

The novels chronicle the horribly abusive life of aristocrat Patrick Melrose, a drug addict who endured a tortuous childhood. The Atlantic says they are “both harrowing and … hilarious … St. Aubyn has a cut-glass prose style, a gift for unexpected metaphor, and a skewering eye.”

“Although reviewers liken Edward St. Aubyn to Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde,” writes The New Yorker‘s esteemed critic James Woods, “he is a colder, more savage writer than either … his fiction reads like a shriek of filial hatred; most of the posh English who people his novels are virulently repellent … [the books have] an aristocratic atmosphere of tart horror, the hideousness of the material contained by a powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose style.”

The collected volume of the first four books, The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk (Macmillan/Picador; OverDrive Sample), spent three weeks on the extended NYT paperback list. The fifth novel, At Last (Macmillan/Picador; OverDrive Sample) hit the LA Times list, peaking at #16.

Cumberbatch has long wanted to play the role according to Deadline. In 2013 he listed Melrose as the answer to an online Q&A session about the role he would most like to play.

As we noted earlier, Cumberbatch has another adaptation in the pipeline. He will also star in and serve as EP for a TV version of Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time.

A new short feature sets up the violent dystopian landscape of Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986; OverDrive Sample), set to being airing on April 26, 2017.. Executive producer and creator Bruce Miller says “It is unquestionably a dark world, but it’s not a dark show. The show is about perspective and not losing the hope of getting your life back.”

Star Elizabeth Moss adds, “Here’s this character stripped of everything, of her rights, of her family, of her friends, and she still can’t quite give up.” 

Atwood’s book broke on to the NYT Paperback Trade Fiction list last week, it is currently #5 (it is #13 on the Combined Print & E-Book list). Along with ther dystopian classics it has seen a sharp rise in popularity since the election, but Handmaid has the additional push of promotions from Hulu, including a Super Bowl spot that sent the title soaring to #1 on Amazon for a while.

A tie-in will be released on March 28, The Handmaid’s Tale (Movie Tie-in), (PRH/Anchor, trade pbk).

Another classic dystopian novel that has soared on best seller lists recently is also getting screen time. The film version of 1984 starring John Hurt will play in art house movie theaters across the country on April 4th. George Orwell’s novel, that is the day the central character begins to rebel against the oppressive regime by keeping a diary.

Debuting this week is a major TV documentary, a heavily anticipated adaptation of a YA novel, and the film version of a long-running inspirational best seller.

When We Rise airs on ABC starting Feb. 27 in a two-hour premiere. Gus Van Sant directs this chronicle of the LGBTQ community’s civil rights movement. Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, created the project, inspired in part by Cleve Jones’s memoir When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (Hachette; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

It runs for eight hours over four nights. The large cast includes Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker, Michael K. Williams, and Rachel Griffiths.

Entertainment Weekly gives it a B+, writing, “It’s a story of a marginalized people who deserve to be recognized, a history we all need to know and own, presented as potent mainstream television.” The LA Times calls it “powerful and moving.” USA Today says it is “overly ambitious … But goodness: Scattered within this history of the battle for gay rights are moments of great power and lessons of great importance, as it pays homage to a struggle that too frequently has been ignored by mainstream television — and has yet to be fully won.”

There is no tie-in but the hardback edition of Jone’s book now has a sticker connecting it to the show.

Before I Fall opens on March 3. It is an adaptation of Lauren Oliver’s debut YA novel, the best seller Before I Fall (HarperCollins, 2010).

Directed by Ry Russo-Young (Nobody Walks), the film stars Zoey Deutch (Vampire Academy), Halston Sage (Goosebumps), Logan Miller (Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) and Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The L Word).

Variety calls it “impressively stylish” and says it “forgoes the overlit Disney Channel look, embracing a cooler, steely-blue aesthetic that’s more in line with such bygone cult faves as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars — plus, it unfolds in that post-Judy Blume space where it’s OK to broach such touchy issues as teen suicide and contraception.”

The Hollywood Reporter says “this neatly written Heathers-meets-Groundhog Day high-concept package delivers both technical polish and a toothsome yet likeable cast. Better still, it has just enough tragic edge to draw young adults, and young-at-heart adults, with melancholy temperaments.”

Tie-in: Before I Fall Movie Tie-in Edition, Lauren Oliver (HarperCollins; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample).

Logan is the 10th X-Men movie and the final Wolverine solo film. It opens on March 3 and stars Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Dafne Keen.

USA Today calls it an “excellent adventure” and says the series ender is a “super sendoff … going out very much on top.” Entertainment Weekly, not as big a fan, gives it a B- and says it is “a high-octane action flick with a protect-the-cub emotional subtext.”

It is not a pure adaptation of the comics, but rather inspired by them. We wrote earlier about one tie-in, Wolverine: Old Man Logan, Mark Millar, illustrated by Steve McNiven (Hachette/Marvel; OverDrive Sample).

William P. Young’s 2007 self-published inspirational blockbuster, The Shack, (later picked up by Hachette/Grand Central; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) has had a long road to the silver screen, but it is finally arriving on March 3.

The film stars Sam Worthington (Avatar), as a father who has lost is faith in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Octavia Spencer (The Help) plays God. Grammy winner Tim McGraw stars as well, alongside Radha Mitchell.

There are few reviews yet but there are multiple tie-ins: The Shack, Wm. Paul Young (Hachette/Windblown Media; Blackstone Audio;  OverDrive Sample; also in mass market). The novel is currently #4 on the NYT combined Fiction best seller list.

The TV series adaptation of Time After Time, based on the 1979 time travel novel by Karl Alexander, as well its earlier film version, will premiere in a 2-hour episode on March 3 on ABC.

The book features author H.G. Wells who creates an actual version of the apparatus featured in his novel The Time Machine, which is used by Jack the Ripper to escape to 1970’s era San Francisco, with Wells on his heels.

For the TV series, the US location was changed to present-day New York. Early reviews are not great. IGN says it “gets off to a bland start that doesn’t inspire much confidence in what’s to come.” Slash Film writes “What’s frustrating about the pilot is that it refuses to deviate from a story that most viewers wouldn’t be disappointed in seeing altered.”

No tie-in has been scheduled, but the book is still available, in a 2010 paperback reprint (Macmillan/Forge Books; OverDrive Sample).

The Academy Awards ceremony often confounds expectations, no more dramatically than it did last night when, just as the La La Land producers were celebrating their win for Best Picture, it was announced that the winner was actually Moonlight.

Expectations that books would take center stage were also confounded. In spite of multiple nominations for films adapted from published material, only Fences, based on the August Wilson play, won a major award, for Viola Davis as Best Supporting Actress.

Even the category of adapted screenplay did not net a win for books. In fact the winner isn’t even  based on a published work, but on an unpublished play that was written as a drama school project, Moonlight.

Despite five nominations, including Best Director, Arrival, based on a story by Ted Chiang, won just one Oscar, for Sound Editing and the books that showed the largest sales boosts from the nominations, Hidden Figures, Lion, and A Man Called Ove, went home empty-handed.

Those books are still doing well, however. The memoir that is the basis for Lion, A Long Way Home, continues to rise on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result of pre-Oscars attention, including People magazine’s “The True Story Behind Lion: How Lost Child Saroo Brierley Found His Birth Mother More Than 20 Years Later.”

The two book-based nominees for Best Animated Feature lost out to the original screenplay, Zootopia. It does, however, have several tie-ins.

Hollywood shows no signs of falling out of love with books, announcing new adaptations each week. As they say in show business, “There’s always next time.”

The film rights to Tom Sweterlitsch’s debut novel were optioned at nearly the same time the cyberpunk crime novel hit shelves in 2014.

The project just got a big boost with the news that Matt Ross, the director of Captain Fantastic has signed on to direct the adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (PRH/Putnam; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) is set in a near future version of Pittsburgh, after a catastrophe reduces it to rubble. A virtual-reality version of the city, called the Archive, allows characters to visit again, including John Blaxton, who lost his wife and unborn child in the disaster. He also investigates cold cases and finds one very much alive within the digital world of the Archive.

“Tomorrow and Tomorrow is prescient, it posits a world not so dissimilar from today, a direction we are all clearly headed, where technology has altered the ways in which we interact with each other and the world around us,” Ross said in a statement. “I hope to examine, following the book’s lead, the degree to which our lives are enhanced, and deeply compromised, by the technology that is already an inseparable part of our daily existence.”

The Hollywood Reporter says that Lynette Howell Taylor, who produced Captain Fantastic and is working on a remake of A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, is on board to produce. So is Mark Gordon, one of the figures behind Saving Private Ryan who is currently working on the all-star update of Murder on the Orient Express.

Librarians chatted with the author as part of our Penguin Random House EarlyReads program (read the chat here). It was picked by LJ as a SF/Fantasy Debut of the Month and as one of 2014’s Summer’s Best Debuts.

The Verge reports that this may not be the only novel by Sweterlitsch to head to the movies. Fox bought the rights to The Gone World in 2015 and Neill Blomkamp (District 9) is in talks to direct.

A sudden bidding war has netted Sony the film rights to Victoria Schwab’s fantasy novel A Darker Shade of Magic (Macmillan/Tor; Tantor Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The novel, the first in the Shades of Magic trilogy, came out in 2015, but as Deadline Hollywood reports, interest in adapting it developed in just the last two weeks, leading Sony to beat out several other notable studios, including Lionsgate.

The books are set in four alternative versions of London, three of which are magical. The main character, Kell, a smuggler and official royal messenger, can travel between worlds and becomes caught in a fast paced adventure when he brings a dangerous relic from Black London into Red.

The two final books in the trilogy have been released, which may be the reason that studios, who love series, suddenly saw its potential. A Conjuring of Light just hit shelves last week, following last year’s A Gathering of Shadows .

Librarians were behind the richly detailed trilogy early on. A Darker Shade of Magic was a LibraryReads pick:

“Fantasy fans should enjoy this atmospheric novel, where London is the link between parallel universes, and magician Kell is one of two Travelers who can move between them. Now something sinister is disturbing their equilibrium, and Kell must try to unravel the plot with only feisty street thief Delilah Bard as an ally.” –Beth Mills, New Rochelle Public Library, New Rochelle, NY

It was also a GalleyChat title. Stephanie Chase (Hillsboro, OR, Public Library) said it “moves with a wonderful fast and yet immersive pace; the fascinating story, with its twists and turns, is not to be missed.”

Gerard Butler (300) will produce the film. Deadline Hollywood says “The trilogy could be ideal for a film franchise … Filmmakers are said to be already lining up for a chance to put their stamp on this fantasy.”

The domestic thriller by B.A. Paris may be headed to the silver screen.

Behind Closed Doors (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; Macmillan; OverDrive Sample) was a hit in the UK, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first week, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It did not do quite as well here, spending just four weeks on the bottom on the NYT bestseller list. It was, however, both a LibraryReads and an Indie Next pick and got starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist.

The novel tells the creepy story of a seemingly perfect couple. A highly successful lawyer and a devoted wife, but that facade covers a horrible life of abuse and sadism. The LibraryReads annotation says:

“On the surface, Jack and Grace have the perfect marriage, the perfect house, and the perfect jobs. What lies beneath the surface is something so sinister yet so believable that it will horrify most readers. What happens behind closed doors and could, or would, you believe it? This is a superb story of psychological abuse that will have your heart racing right up to the end.” — Marika Zemke, Commerce Township Public Library, Commerce Twp, MI

Melissa London Hilfers will write the adaptation. She tells Deadline that the book is a “gripping, modern Hitchcockian thriller exploring what truth lies beneath the veneer we all project.”

It is early days yet and there is no news about who will direct or star.

A moody still from the upcoming film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (PRH/Anchor; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) features star Saoirse Ronan, called ” a turquoise vision” by Entertainment Weekly.

The two-time Oscar nominated actress stars with newcomer Billy Howle. McEwan wrote the screenplay and Dominic Cooke (The Hollow Crown) directs, his first time doing a feature film. The cinematographer is Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave, Queen of Katwe, and Wonderland.)

The film does not yet have a release date and no tie-in has been announced.

It follows a long line of adaptations of McEwan’s work. He has already had eight of his novels or short stories turned into films and more are on the way.

Announced earlier this month, Benedict Cumberbatch will work with BBC One and PBS Masterpiece to adapt the award-winning 1987 novel The Child In Time (PRH/Anchor; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample). Cumberbatch is set to star and executive produce.

The most famous and successful McEwan adaptation was 2007’s Atonement, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and Saoirse Ronan. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. 

Ewan says, in the 2011 video below, that he has found the adaptation of his books into films generally a good experience (note: at the time of the video, a different director and actress were set to do On Chesil Beach). 

Expected to be the most politically charged event in its history, the Academy Awards will be broadcast on Sunday. Two of the nominees are seen as particularly timely and the books they are based on have become best sellers.

Keying in to current events to promote their film Lion, the Weinstein Company placed an ad in Thursday’s L.A. Times, featuring one of the young stars and the words, “It took an extraordinary effort to get 8-year-old actor Sunny Pawar a visa so that he could come to America for the very first time, Next year, that might not be an option” and the exhortation to “Remember where you came from.”

The basis for that movie, A Long Way Home: A Memoir by Saroo Brierley (PRH/Berkley), retitled Lion for the tie-in, showed a sudden rise on Amazon’s sales rankings after the the ad’s appearance.

Considered a precursor to Sunday’s event, political commentary also ran through last month’s Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony. Taraji P. Henson, the star of the surprise best film winner, Hidden Figures, said in her acceptance speech, “There’s a reason why it was made now and not three years ago, not five years ago, not 10 years ago. The universe needed it now.”

The basis for that movie, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly  (HarperCollins/Morrow), has been in the top five on USA Today‘s bestseller list since the beginning of the year.

See our full list of tie-ins to the nominees here.

Nicole Kidman has optioned Janice Y.K Lee’s sophomore novel, The Expatriates (PRH/Penguin, 2016; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), for a planned TV series, reports Deadline Hollywood.

Lee’s debut, The Piano Teacher (PRH/Penguin, 2009), was a hit, selling well and landing on the NYT bestseller lists in both hardback and paperback. In paperback it spent 18 weeks on the list in total, 7 weeks in the top 10, and rose as high as #2.

The Expatriates did not do as well, spending only one week on the NYT hardcover list before falling off. It did get some notable attention. USA Today wrote, “Raise a glass: The first great book-club novel of 2016 has arrived” and the NYT wrote Lee is “A female, funny Henry James in Asia … vividly good on the subject of Americans abroad.” The LA Times highlights her novel’s strong sense of place.

The novel is about three women, all members of the Western expat community, who connect and circle around each other as their relationships deepen.  Alice Bell (Suburban Mayhem) will write the adaptation and Kidman is considering a lead role.

Kidman, and her Blossom Films partner, Per Saari, will executive produce and Deadline says “The project will be shopped to premium networks and streaming-services.”

Like her frequent collaborator Reese Witherspoon, Kidman has become a powerhouse in literary adaptations. Blossom Films created the big screen adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang and are behind the HBO series Big Little Lies, based on Liane Moriarty’s bestseller. The company is also working on a big screen adaptation of another of Moriarty’s hits, Truly Madly Guilty, as well as the upcoming adaptations of A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife and Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia.