In what might be some consolation for not making it to the Booker shortlist this year, J.M. Coetzee’s award-winning novel, Waiting For The Barbarians (PRH/Penguin) is being adapted as a feature film.

Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. This year,  The Schooldays of Jesus (PRH/Viking; Feb. 2017) was on the longlist, but did not make the cut to the shortlist.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Coetzee adapted his novel for the film. Oscar winner Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) will star and Oscar nominated director Ciro Guerra, who earned praise for Embrace of the Serpent, will helm the project says the trade source.

In their review of the book, the NYT wrote “Mr. Coetzee tells the story of an imaginary Empire, set in an unspecified place and time, yet recognizable as a ‘universalized’ version of South Africa. This allows Mr. Coetzee some esthetic distance from his subject, for even while remaining locked with the history of his moment, he isn’t completely at the mercy of its local chaos and ugliness. The result is a realistic fable, at once stark, exciting and economical.”

NPR brought new focus on the novel in 2014 when they named it “This Week’s Must Read” after the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its report about the “brutal interrogation techniques used by the CIA after Sept 11.”

A new trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One debuted today on CBS This Morning.

The two and a half minute trailer is examined for clues to the story line by The Verge noting, “Disney has been careful to downplay its expectations for Rogue One. It’s the first major film set outside of the traditional saga, and has been characterized as ‘an experiment’ by the company’s CEO, Bob Iger.”

There are several tie-ins, of course but, following the precedent set by The Force Awakens, the official novelizations for Rogue One will not be released until after the film premieres on Dec. 16, 2016, to avoid spoilers.

Arriving ahead of the movie is a prequel, the Catalyst (Star Wars): A Rogue One Novel, (PRH/Del Rey, Nov. 15, 2016) written by James Luceno, the author of a number of earlier Star Wars titles.

See our downloadable list here. Our full list of upcoming tie-ins here.

Despite fears about Hurricane Matthew closing many theaters, Girl on the Train rolled to its expected major box office opening over the weekend. On the other hand, The Birth of a Nation, about a slave uprising, considered a major Oscar contender, did not do as well as expected.

Next week, two film adaptations open, one in theaters and the other on TV, and a new BBC series begins on PBS Masterpiece.

Set in Montana and opening in limited release on Oct. 14 is Certain Women, which the Toronto Film Festival site describes as “a tripartite portrait of striving, independent women whose lives intersect in suggestive and powerful ways.”

It is getting strong reviews. Calling the director among the “great American filmmakers,” Variety said few “can do quite as much with quiet as Kelly Reichardt. Superficially empty soundscapes are layered so intricately with the rustle of nature, the brooding of weather and the breathing of preoccupied people that her films come to seem positively noisy to a sympathetic ear. So it is in the marvelous Certain Women, where the storytelling has a similarly latent impact.”

It stars Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, and Lily Gladstone and is based on short stories from Maile Meloy’s collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (PRH/Riverhead, 2009), specifically, says Variety “Tome,” “Native Sandstone” and “Travis B.”

A tie-in edition has not been released.

Coming to Masterpiece, The Durrells in Corfu. It is a six-part adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and its two sequels says PBS.

It airs Sundays, October 16th through November 20th and stars Keeley Hawes from Upstairs Downstairs “as the an intrepid widow who decamps from dreary England to a sun-dappled Greek island with her four recalcitrant children, ages 11 to 21.”

A hit across the pond, ITV reports the show will run in the UK for its second season.

There is a tie-in:
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell (PRH/Penguin).

Also airing on TV is The Julius House: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, based on the Charlaine Harris character of a crime-solving librarian. The series began in 2007 with Real Murders, the most recent is the 2016 title All the Little Liars.

Hallmark has previously aired episodes based on the first three novels in the series: Real Murders, A Bone to Pick, and Three Bedrooms, One Corpse.

The newest adapts the fourth novel, The Julius House. All star Full House alum Candace Cameron Bure.

New tie-ins have not been issued.

The film Patriots Day deals with a sensitive subject, the terrorist bombing during the 2013 Boston marathon.

The movie is open to objections that it exploits painful events relatively soon after they took place. As a result, the NYT reports CBS films is to rolling out the trailer with care. Just released today, it is muted, focusing on the collective strength that the Boston police force and the city showed in the face of the bombing rather than the event itself.

Based on the nonfiction title, Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge (UP New England/ForeEdge), it follows the events of the bombing and the citywide manhunt to find the terrorists.

Directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) it stars Mark Wahlberg, J. K. Simmons, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and Michelle Monaghan. The film will open in limited release on December 21, 2016 (qualifying it for the 2017 Oscar race) with a wide release on January 13, 2017.

In a twist on the movie trailer, Dan Brown, Google, and Sony Entertainment have partnered to create a puzzle game for fans of Robert Langdon.

USA Today reports the three-week run of games, called Inferno Journey Through Hell, is designed to increase interest in the forthcoming film, Inferno, opening October 28.

Brown told the paper that “It’s always been of interest to me to create a treasure hunt online where people who don’t have the opportunity to travel can take the quest virtually and interact with real works of art and locations and have the experience from their living room or office.”

It is also a giant product placement for Google as the clues needed to solve the puzzles are “hidden in various Google products such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search and Google Play as well as on social-media platforms,” reports USA Today.  Players can win weekly prizes including a trip to Florence, Venice, Rome and Milan.

Brown serves as an executive producer for the film and says that director Ron Howard and lead actor Tom Hanks “very generously pretend I’m relevant, but once the screenplay’s done, my part in the movie is complete and I can just watch what really becomes a different telling of my story.”

Traditional forms of marketing are also being unleashed, including a series of trailers. The latest below:

And several tie-ins:

Inferno (Movie Tie-in Edition), Dan Brown

Trade Paperback, (PRH/Anchor)
Mass Market, (PRH/Anchor)
Audio CD (PRH/Random House Audio)
Inferno (Movie Tie-in edition en Espanol), (PRH/ Vintage Espanol)

An all-star cast is set to bring one of Simon Winchester’s most beloved nonfiction accounts to the the screen, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HC/Harper Perennial, 1998; OverDrive Sample).

Mel Gibson and Sean Penn will star in the film about James Murray, the 19th century professor who compiled the OED.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Gibson will play Murray and that the project is a passion of his. He has been working on getting the adaptation made for “nearly two decades.” Penn will play Dr. W.C. Minor, the “madman” who contributed thousands of entries to the dictionary.

Ioan Gruffudd (Fantastic Four) is set to join the cast and Entertainment Weekly reports that Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) will also feature in the film.

This is another turn in what may count as a comeback for Gibson. He is “fresh off the back of Venice Film Festival hit Hacksaw Ridge, a World War II drama” says Deadline, and he got strong reviews for this year’s Blood Father.

A premiere date has not been announced.

The Tim Burton adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was tops at the box office, this weekend, propelling the book further up Amazon’s sales rankings. Unfortunately, the high expectations for Disney’s Queen of Katwe, were not met in its expanded release, although it did well with critics.

After much drum-rolling, The Girl on the Train finally pulls into theaters this coming Friday. Directed by Tate Taylor (The Help), it stars Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, and Luke Evans.

No reviews yet, but the NYT and the WSJ [subscription maybe required] ran features on the film last week. Apparently the film version scared the author, reports NYT, “It’s a shocking film in parts, really frightening … It’s an odd thing, because I actually know what’s happening, but it felt really fresh to me.” Tie-ins were released in August.

James Patterson moves in to the lucrative family movie genre with the adaptation of his  Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life.

Directed by Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care), it stars Griffin Gluck, Lauren Graham, Rob Riggle, Retta, and Thomas Barbusca. It opens Oct. 7.

A tie-in came out in August.

The Great Gilly Hopkins. an adaptation of Katherine Paterson’s 1978 National Book Award-winning children’s novel of the same name (it also was a Newbery Honor Award title) also opens this weekend, with a simultaneous release on VOD.

The family film is directed by Stephen Herek (101 Dalmatians) and stars Sophie Nélisse, Julia Stiles, Glenn Close, Kathy Bates, Octavia Spencer, Bill Cobbs, and Billy Magnussen. No tie-in has been released.

Generally, Hollywood thinks of “writers” as  those people who turn out screenplays. Recently, Hollywood has had to give respect to another kind of writer, those who create books, which can then be turned into money-making movies or TV shows.

In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter created their first list of the “25 Most Powerful Authors,” an idea that didn’t have
much currency at the time. When #8 on the list, James Patterson was contacted, he thought the notion was crazy. “Power list? More like powerless list.”

He moves up to #3 in this year’s group of what the THR calls the most powerful “word nerds” saying, in seemingly non-ironic movie biz lingo, that they are doing better than ever because they are “among the creator groups benefiting from the proliferation of new platforms and outlets in entertainment.”

Featured on the cover are Paula Hawkins (above, left) author of The Girl On The Train and Emily Blunt, the star of the film adaptation widely expected to be a blockbuster when it opens on Oct. 7th.

Hawkins tells THR that she doesn’t agree with all the comparisons to another best selling book with “Girl” in the title that was also adapted into a blockbuster film, seeing her book as not about unlikable women and the dark side of suburbia, but rather, “how technology has turned us all into voyeurs.”

Also included in the issue is a story about a classic author receiving renewed attention from Hollywood, Agatha Christie, as well as profiles of “6 Up-and-Comers to Watch” including Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperLuxe, Sept. 6). A film adaptation is currently scheduled for release in January.

Coming to theaters Oct. 14, is a documentary about Maya Angelou, titled And Still I Rise.

Deadline reports, “From her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her swinging soirees with Malcolm X in Ghana to her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, we are given special access to interviews with Dr. Angelou whose indelible charm and quick wit make it easy to love her.”

The trailer was released last week:

Making a splash at the box office over the weekend was Disney’s heavily-promoted Queen of Katwe, in a limited run. The adaptation of a book with the same title about a chess champion, it will expand to more theaters over the coming weeks. Also expanding to more theaters is the Australian hit adaptation, The Dressmaker.

Leading films opening at the end of this week is Tim Burton’s adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

Based on Ransom Riggs’s eerie photo-fantasy hit novel, it stars Samuel L. Jackson, Asa Butterfield, Eva Green, Chris O’Dowd, Ella Purnell, Allison Janney, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp and Judi Dench.

Early reviews are not enthusiastic. The Hollywood Reporter says that during the first hour of the movie, it “appears Tim Burton seems well on his way to making one of his best films,” but after that special effects take over and undermine the story. Predicting the movie will “generate some robust initial business based on the built-in teen fan base as well as Burton fans, but whether it’s enough to spur sequels to the two remaining books in the trilogy is an open question.”  The novel is currently #6 on The USA Today Best-Selling Book list.

There are multiple tie-ins.

Denial is a courtroom drama about the legal fight to prove the Holocaust occurred. It is based on Deborah E. Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier and is directed by Mick Jackson. Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson and Timothy Spall star.

It centers on a libel case brought against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, who posts videos Variety says are like watching “the hate version of a man claiming that the Earth is flat.”

Its debut at the Toronto Film Festival brought mixed reviews. Variety calls it “a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.”

The Hollywood Reporter says it is “compelling” and “sensitively dramatized” and that “Rachel Weisz’s arresting, combative Lipstadt, a shining woman warrior, is a role she will be remembered for.”

A tie-in is out: Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, Deborah E. Lipstadt (HC/Ecco).

Comic fans can rejoice as Luke Cage, a live action series on Netfilx, finally airs. It is based on the comic superhero which first appeared in 1972’s Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.

Mike Colter plays Cage, a role he first created on the Jessica Jones series, also on Netflix.

Deadline Hollywood says it is “one of the most socially relevant and smartest shows on the small screen you will see this year. In fact, with star power deluxe from lead Mike Colter and House Of Cards alum Mahershala Ali as the villainous Cornell Cottonmouth Stokes, the 13-episode first season is one of the best shows on the air and on the horizon.”

A collection of comics featuring the character was released in August,  Luke Cage: Avenger, Mike Benson, Adam Glass, Brian Michael Bendis, Frank Miller, Dalibor Talajic, Leinil Francis, Billy Tan and, Eric Canete (Hachette/Marvel).

A Man Called Ove opens as well. The film, based on Fredrik Backman’s book of the same name, is directed Hannes Holm (who also adapted the novel) and stars Rolf Lassgård.

Sweden has already picked it as their entry for this year’s Foreign Language Film Oscar race, reports Deadline Hollywood.

The Daily Beast examines the novel’s word-of-mouth success.

Reviews for the film are glowing with Variety calling it “irresistible … A touching comic crowdpleaser that may call for a tissue or two by the end.”

Milton’s Secret is based on the children’s book Milton’s Secret: An Adventure of Discovery through Then, When, and the Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle and Robert S. Friedman with illustrations by Frank Riccio (Red Wheel Weiser Conari/Hampton Roads).

Directed by Barnet Bain, it stars Donald Sutherland, Michelle Rodriguez, Mia Kirshner, David Sutcliffe, and William Ainscough.

So far, there are few reviews for the film about being present and aware and creating a happy family.

A film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is set to premiere on February 17, 2017 starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey.

Plans for the adaptation of the enormous series, which includes novels, short stories and comics, have been in the works for at least a decade. Originally, it was conceived as a trilogy of movies, with a TV series between each film.

Finding financial backing for such a large project proved difficult. Finally, the film adaptation was announced, but whether there would be sequels or a TV component hinged on the first film’s success.

But now, reports Entertainment Weekly, plans have firmed up for the TV series. Intended to fill in the backstory, the series is expected to air in 2018, around the time the film hits streaming and cable channels.

Idris Elba, who plays the gunslinger Roland Deschain in the movie, is on board to reprise the role on the small screen, along with Tom Taylor, Jake Chambers, but there is no word yet if Matthew McConaughey will also make the transition.

EW reports the 10- to 13-episode show will cover “Roland’s origin story [set] years before the events depicted in the film” and that,  while some material for the TV series will be taken from The Gunslinger, “the bulk of the show will focus on the fourth book in the saga, Wizard and Glass” which is “primarily a prequel” to the series.

The LA Times reports that at least three additional key figures from the film, including the director and two of the writers, are involved with the TV series. It has not been announced which network will carry it, but EW predicts that, given the content, it will land with a cable or streaming service.

The entire series is being re-released in mass market paperback starting in October in anticipation of the film’s release (see our list of tie-ins to upcoming movies).

Heading off the comic page and onto the silver screen is Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke (Macmillan/First Second; 2/1/11; OverDrive Sample) reports Deadline Hollywood. Fox Animation has acquired rights to the trilogy. Morgan Jurgenson and Alex Ankeles (Robodog) will adapt the books.

The graphic novel trilogy, created by award-winning Hatke, follows the adventures of Zita as she learns to be brave and navigate her far out world. Bleeding Cool lists it as one of the “Essential 8 Comics For Kids,” writing:

“… everything I love about comic books; adventure, humor, humanity and a big heaping dose of wonder … Hatke has made something really special here … original and fun. It’s completely appropriate for kids but like the best stories, I think everyone will appreciate it.”

The other books in the trilogy are:

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (9/4/12; OverDrive Sample)

The Return of Zita the Spacegirl (5/13/14; OverDrive Sample)

Hatke won an Eisner Award for Little Robot. His other books include Nobody Likes a Goblin, and Julia’s House for Lost Creatures.

First Second reports that “Of all our books, Zita the Spacegirl has earned the most fan photos and cosplay” and provides some images to prove it.

Wired interviewed the author shortly after the second book in the trilogy hit shelves (accompanied by bonus illustrations).

Jennifer Weiner’s debut book for children, The Littlest Bigfoot (S&S/Aladdin; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample), will be adapted as an animated feature reports Deadline Hollywood. The first in a planned trilogy, Deadline reports that Weiner is writing the second, titled Little Bigfoot, Big City, expected in November 2017.

Weiner will serve as executive producer. Chris Bender (We’re the Millers) and Jennifer’s brother Jake Weiner (A History of Violence) will create the feature with 20th Century Fox Animation. Keeping it all in the family, brother Joe Weiner, negotiated the deal.

Pre-publication reviews are strong. Publishers Weekly described it as a “witty story of outcasts coming together,” adding, “Well-drawn characters, high comedy, and an open-ended finale will leave readers eager for the next installment.”

Another of the 2016 Man Booker Prize shortlist titles had made the first step towards adaptation.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Graeme Macrae Burnet’s historical crime thriller His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae (Skyhorse; OverDrive Sample), has been optioned for a TV series.

The Scottish production company Synchronicity Films, known in the UK as the force behind Not Another Happy Ending, has bought the rights.

Originally published by a tiny 2-person house Saraband, the novel earned praise from The Guardian, which said “The book’s pretense at veracity, as well as being a literary jeux d’esprit, brings an extraordinary historical period into focus.”

Skyhorse picked it up for US publication after its Booker nod.

Another of this year’s shortlist titles, Ottessa Moshfegh’s literary thriller Eileen, as we noted earlier, is being adapted by screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, “Hollywood’s Go-To Scribe for Thrillers” for producer Scott Rudin, known for his many successful literary adaptations.

If the projects make it to screens, they will follow in the footsteps of adaptations of previous Booker titles. Hilary Mantel’s two winners Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were made into a BBC/PBS Masterpiece series. Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally became the now iconic 1993 film Schindler’s List. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi were also successfully adapted.

Filming begins in Baltimore this week on the Oprah Winfrey vehicle, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on Rebecca Skloot’s book of the same title. The book is still on the NYT Nonfiction Paperback list after 184 weeks, following over a year on the hardcover list.

The events in the book took place in Baltimore and the film will include sites around the John Hopkins hospital, the location where Lacks’s cells were taken without her knowledge and used to create the cell line used by scientist in such medical advances as the polio vaccine.

Oprah is playing Deborah Lacks in the HBO production, Henrietta’s daughter and the character through whom the story is told in the book.

WJZ, the station where Oprah once worked as a news anchor, reports on the upcoming locations, interviewing residents, one of which says “It’s a story that needs to be told. Needs to be told, I think in the context of things that are still happening today, that still violate peoples rights, and people’s property and their own being.”

Lacks’s legacy is extending beyond the scientific uses of her cells. In Vancouver, WA a special school named in her honor is training students who want to be medical researchers, the Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School. The president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle recently visited the school and said that Lacks’s “legacy is not a cell line she left us … Her legacy is the people like you who train here … Looking ahead, I can’t imagine what you might go on to do.”