The satiric debut novel Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan (RH/Doubleday), published in June, has been acquired for the big screen by the production company behind The Hunger Games.

The book has been particularly successful on the West Coast. It has been on the lower rungs of  the L.A. Times best seller for three weeks and was featured in the newspaper’s “Summer Reading Guide.”

In a statement, producer Nina Jacobson said, “Crazy Rich Asians is that immersive page turner I am constantly searching for but so rarely find. Kevin’s writing took me into a world I’d never seen or imagined and got me so invested in the romance at the heart of it that I could not put the book down until I saw whether or not they made it. This novel represents an enormous opportunity … to tell a universal story to a global audience.” The latter probably refers to the lucrative Chinese market (which, notes the South China Morning Post in reporting the story, is now the second-largest after the U.S.).

The book has very little in common with The Hunger Games.  New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called it a “a dizzily shopaholic comedy of crass manners,” that “offers refreshing nouveau voyeurism to readers who long ago burned out on American and English aspirational fantasies.”

Check your holds; they are heavy in some libraries.

Ann Leary’s novel The Good House, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s; Macmillan Audio) is told through the eyes of a woman who is pretending to be sober, although her life is clearly unraveling. Despite the somber material, it still manages to be “wickedly funny” according to People magazine, which made it one of their Picks in January. It is being adapted as a movie,  starring Meryl Streep and  Robert De Niro, according to Deadline.

The Good House was on the extended NYT Hardcover Fiction best seller list for 5 weeks.

If you’ve had trouble imaging Zoolander as that epitome of milquetoasts, Walter Mitty, below is the first trailer for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on James Thurber’s 1939 short story.

The story  was also made into a 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye. Although this is often referred to as a remake of the  Kaye film, Stiller, who stars in and directs this version, says it has “its own tone.” One major difference from the previous movie; in this one, Mitty works for Life magazine, rather as a pulp-fiction writer.

The movie arrives in theaters this Christmas. Also in the cast are Kristen Wiig, Sean Penn, Shirley MacLaine, Kathryn Hahn, and Adam Scott.

Harvey Weinstein is reuniting with his old nemesis Walt Disney Studios (now under different leadership), for a live-action adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s fantasy novels for children, Artemis Fowl. As Variety notes, “Weinstein has been working on a bigscreen version of Artemis Fowl since 2000.”

The film will be based on the first two books in the series. MTV is already speculating on which young actors should be considered for the lead as the 12-year-old Artemis.

The eighth and final novel in the series, The Last Guardian, (Disney Book Group), came out last year.

If, like P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, (HMH), you hate the sanitized Disney version of her heroine, then you may be looking forward to Emma Thompson’s portrayal of a prickly Travers, as she struggles against the charms of Tom Hanks’ Walt in the movie Saving Mr. Banks.

The trailer claims the film is based on the “Untold True Story.” Perhaps this version has not been told, but others have. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers, by Valerie Lawson (S&S, 2006), according to the Publishers Weekly review, details Travers’s “fussy movie negotiations with Walt Disney and the downplaying of her authorship in the 1964 hit film.” It is even being re-released with a note on the cover that it “Explores the events that inspired the major motion picture Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks.”

In “Becoming Mary Poppins,” published in The New Yorker in 2005, prior to the opening of a theatrical version of Mary Poppins on Broadway (with a script by Downton Abbey‘s Julian Fellowes and judged to be a “faithful rendering of the books’ brisk and sophisticated comic sensibility”), Caitlin Flanagan writes that, far from trying to charm Travers, Disney didn’t even meet with her at first. Instead, he palmed her off on the two songwriters he had hired for an agonizing, week-long story meeting. He left town, going to a ranch in Palm Springs to “read scripts.”

When Travers confronted Disney after the movie’s premiere, to which she hadn’t even been invited, demanding some changes,

Disney looked at her coolly. “Pamela,” he replied, “the ship has sailed.” And then he strode past her, toward a throng of well-wishers, and left her alone, an aging woman in a satin gown and evening gloves, who had travelled more than five thousand miles to attend a party where she was not wanted.

For those who are only aware of the supercalifragilistic version of Mary Poppins, Saving Mr. Banks may shed new light on the original, but it is likely to be a rose-colored light. Saving Mr. Banks is, after all, a Disney movie.

The film premieres in limited release Dec. 13 and expands nationwide on Dec. 20.

A release date for the movie Parkland, based on Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the JFK assassination, Reclaiming History, (Norton, 2007), has been set for Sept. 20, a date regarded by Deadline as a bid for Oscar nominations (release was orginally planned for Nov. 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination). The movie  focuses on the chaos that ensued at Parkland Hospital in Dallas when Kennedy was brought there after the shooting. It is produced by Tom Hanks’ Playtone Partners. Stars include Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver and Paul Giamatti (as Abraham Zapruder, the man in the crowd who captured the assassination on his home movie camera).

The release date for the tie-in is now likely to be moved up.

Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition)
Vincent Bugliosi
Trade paperback: $16.95
Norton, (2013-09-23)
ISBN / EAN: 0393347338 / 9780393347333

Former Bond Girl, Rosamund Pike has accepted the lead role of Amy in David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (RH/Crown), opposite Ben Affleck, according to Entertainment Weekly. She most recently starred opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher.

The film is expected to begin production in September, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, production for a film based on the author’s previous title, Dark Places (RH/Crown), starring Chloe Moretz and Nicholas Hoult, is expected to begin in August.

The Washington Post‘s Ron Charles interviewed Flynn last week, who talked about the moment she realized Gone Girl was a hit.

Film rights have just been acquired for A.M. Homes’s novel, May We Be Forgiven, (Penguin/Viking) winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), reports Deadline.

About a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving and its aftermath, this darkly humorous story, said the L.A. Times critic, “is so fast-moving and pushes its characters to such extremes that it quickly moves into a zone that’s a farcical hyper-realism.”

A few of the earlier  prize winners have been made into movies, most notably Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, which starred Tilda Swinton. It was a sensation at the 2011 Cannes film festival but did not get the expected Oscar nominations. Filming for the 2007 Prize winner, Half of a Yellow Sun by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been completed. Some footage has appeared online, but  no release date has been set.

Divergent author Veronica Roth and the stars of the upcoming film based on the first in her YA dystopian series, which opens March 14, appeared on a panel at Comic-Con yesterday. The audience got to see footage from the film, but it has not been released online (Entertainment Weekly offered a “first look,” with stills from the set last month).

Plot details have not been revealed for the final book of the trilogy, Allegiant (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen; HarperAudio; Dreamscape Audio, Oct 22), but CNN reports that Roth said it will be told from two points of view; that of Tris and her love interest Four.

The film of the second book in the series, Insurgent, is expected in 2015.

Tie-ins:

Divergent Movie Tie-in Edition
Veronica Roth
On Sale Date: February 11, 2014
HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen
9780062289841, 0062289845
Hardback; $17.99 US / $23.99 Can.

9780062289858, 0062289853
Paperback; $9.99 US / $10.99 Can.

Following the teaser trailer for Catching Fire that was released in April, a new trailer debuted  at Comic-Con on Saturday. Reports MTV News, “While the first trailer for Catching Fire focused on Katniss’ pre-Games press tour, the new one introduces much more of the civil unrest rising throughout Panem after Katniss’ inspirational subversion of the Hunger Games rules.” Entertainment Weekly comments, the new trailer “offered up first looks at the Arena (Katniss dives right in!), the action (Johanna especially), and the fashion (looks like Cinna stepped up his game).”

The movie arrives Nov. 22

Tie-ins:

Catching Fire: Movie Tie-in Edition: The Second Book of The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
Scholastic
On Sale Date: October 8, 2013
9780545603683, 0545603684
Paperback, $12.99
 

Catching Fire: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion
Kate Egan
Scholastic
On Sale Date: November 22, 2013
9780545599337, 0545599334
Paperback, $18.99

The movie based on Cheryl Strayed’s best selling memoir and Oprah 2.0 pick, Wild (RH/Knopf) took a step closer to reality yesterday when it was announced that Fox Searchlight had acquired distribution rights. Reese Witherspoon will produce and star. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay.

Witherspoon, who has had good luck with book adaptations (Election, Water for Elephants), has several others in the works, including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Random House). Witherspoon is producing and Ben Affleck was recently cast to star. Most sources say she is not planning to co-star.

She may join the all-star cast for Inherent Vice, based on the Thomas Pynchon detective novel (Penguin Press, 2009), with Joaquin Phoenix, Sean Penn, Owen Wilson, Jena Malone, Benicio Del Toro, and Martin Short and is set to star in the adaptation of Three Little Words, based on Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s YA memoir (S&S/Atheneum) about growing up in the foster care system.

Also, prior to its publication last month, she optioned the rights to J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, (RH/Knopf) .

The movies based on Dan Brown’s series featuring symbolist Robert Langdon do not follow the sequence of the books. The first to be filmed was The Da Vinci Code (RH/Doubleday, 2003), based on the second in the series. The second movie was based on the first book, Angels & Demons (2000). Skipping ahead to the fourth in the series,  the release date for the adaptations of  Inferno (2013), starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, was just announced  for Dec. 18, 2015, according to Deadline.

A film of the third book in the series, The Lost Symbol (2009) is now officially in limbo.

The movie based on the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was sold into slavery, winning his freedom 12 years later, was recently moved from a Dec. release date to Oct 18 (regarded as a more advantageous time for attracting Oscar attention).

The trailer was released late yesterday:

Official Movie Site: 12YearsASlave.com

Tie-in:
Twelve Years a Slave: (Movie Tie-In), Solomon Northup
Penguin
On Sale Date: September 4, 2013
9780143125419, 0143125419
Trade paperback $16.00 US / $17.00 Can.

– See more at: http://www.earlyword.com/#sthash.thmcet9A.dpuf

A biopic about Nelson Mandela, based on his 1994  memoir, Long Walk to Freedom
will debut in an Oscar-qualifying limited release in the U.S. on November 29.

The first UK teaser trailer is below (it lists UK release date of January).

Idris Elba plays Mandela and Naomie Harris his former wife, Winnie.

Tie-ins:

Long Walk to Freedom : The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela
Hachette/Back Bay
On Sale Date: October 8, 2013
9780316323543, 0316323543
Trade Paperback; $18.00 US / $20.00 Can.
Hachette Audio
$30.00 US / $33.00 Can.

Chronicle is also releasing a book about the film:
Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedo : The Book of the Film
Nelson Mandela, Keith Bernstein
Chronicle Books
On Sale Date: November 26, 2013
9781452128412, 1452128413
Hardback; $35.00 US

Two films based on books will be opening earlier than originally planned. Both changes are are regarded as bids for Oscar nominations.

The Book Thief  based on the  2007 Printz Honor novel  by Markus Zusak, originally scheduled for January, will debut in a limited run on Nov. 15, According to Entertainment Weekly, “the earlier date suggests studio confidence and a possible awards-season bid.” In it, French-Canadian actress Sophie Nelisse makes her English-language film debut as Liesel, a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany. Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson  play her foster parents. The film is directed by Brian Percival, who directed Downton Abbey‘s series pilot, and several episodes.

Tie-in:
The Book Thief , Markus Zusak
Knopf Books for Young Readers
On Sale Date: October 22, 2013
9780385754729, 0385754728
Paperback, $12.99 US / $14.99 Can.

Twelve Years a Slave based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, moves from Dec. 27 to Oct. 18, “putting it smack in the middle of the best time to release movies into the Oscar race,” notes Awards Daily. Directed by Steve McQueen, it stars Chiwetel Ejiofor  as Solomon Northup, Michael Fassbender as a cruel slave owner, with Brad Pitt as a Canadian abolitionist. Also starring are Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kenneth Williams and the youngest actress to ever receive an Oscar nomination, Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild).

USA Today offers a “First Look” at  stills from the movie.

Tie-in:
Twelve Years a Slave: (Movie Tie-In), Solomon Northup
Penguin
On Sale Date: September 4, 2013
9780143125419, 0143125419
Trade paperback $16.00 US / $17.00 Can.