The popular movie Home from DreamWorks Animation is set for a TV spinoff,  Home: Adventures With Tip & Oh, to debut July 29 on Netflix reports Deadline. The movie was based on Adam Rex’s chapter book, The True Meaning of Smekday, (Disney/Hyperion; Listening Library).

The series will have a new voice cast, with Rachel Crow as Tip, replacing Rihanna and Mark Whitten as Oh, replacing Jim Parsons.

Below, the movie Oh tests out various Earth objects — you WILL love the last one, trust us.

Several tie-ins to the movie were published:

Tip’s Tips on Friendship
Thies Schwarz
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback: $3.99 USD, $4.99 CAD
Ages 5 to 7, Grades K to 2

Home : The Chapter Book
Tracey West
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback: $5.99 USD, $6.99 CAD
Ages 7 to 10, Grades 2 to 5

The Story of One Super Boov
Ellie O’Ryan, Pierre Collet-Derby
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback; $3.99 USD, $4.99 CAD
Ages 3 to 7, Grades P to 2
NOTE: This is a 24-page 8 by 8, but it’s sticker-free

Not only does Robert Kirkman rule the horror/thriller airwaves with his hit AMC series The Wallking Dead, he is about to get more screen exposure as Outcast premieres on Cinemax in a 10 episode run starting June 3.

Based on the comic Kirkman writes and Paul Azaceta illustrates, the supernatural horror tale stars Patrick Fugit (Gone Girl) and Philip Glenister (Life on Mars) as two characters caught in a web of demonic possession.

According to ScreenCrush, before the show even airs it has been renewed for a second season in 2017.

ScreenRant reports that Krikman began working on the TV adaptation before the first print issue of Outcast was published and plans for the series to be an epic horror tale full of scares.

Two collected editions are currently in print with a third to follow on June 15.

Below is the latest trailer for the show, released yesterday:

Outcast news arrives just in time to tease the season end of The Walking Dead on April 3, which AMC is pushing hard with the reveal of Negan, a character Den of Geek calls “a force of nature, unflinching in his cruelty, and the most formidable opponent Rick and his group have ever faced.”

Entertainment Weekly reports that the final episode is very rough and made star “Andrew Lincoln was so distraught, it was the only time he’s ever shown up late for work. Lauren Cohan says she didn’t even want to go to work. Josh McDermitt threw his script across the room [and] Norman Reedus … couldn’t speak after [watching] it.”

Season 7 of The Walking Dead will air sometime this October, as announced back in 2015 by a very confident AMC.

Fulfilling hints last week that the film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, Allegiant, would open to some hard critical hits, The Guardian gives it two stars (out of five), saying “All types of people will find something that irks them in the penultimate part of the Divergent franchise,” while A.V. Club gave it a C+, under the headline “Allegiant is the best Divergent yet, and still not good enough.”

The news for The Little Prince was even worse, it was yanked from distribution just a few days before it was due to open. UPDATE: Netflix has since picked up the rights with plans to stream it “later this year.”

Whether or not it does well at the box office, Miracles from Heaven, starring Jennifer Garner opening today has already propelled the tie-in onto best seller lists. It moved to #20 on the week’s USA Today list.

On to next week. Viewers will have a chance to re-visit a number of favorite characters from the past.

The biggest movie opening is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Starring Ben Affleck as Batman, Henry Cavill as Superman, and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. It opens March 25th.

Anticipation is high for the iconic smackdown as Batman decides Superman is a bit out of control. Deadline reports advanced ticket sales are outpacing those for Deadpool, Avengers, and Furious 7.

A junior novel tie-in came out last month. It was billed as a companion novel and riffs off the movie, Cross Fire: An Original Companion Novel (Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice), Michael Kogge (Scholastic Inc.; OverDive Sample).

I Saw The Light also opens on the 25th. It tells the story of country-western singer Hank Williams and stars Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen.

A tie-in came out last November: I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams, Colin Escott with George Merritt and William MacEwen (Hachette/Back Bay Books; OverDrive Sample).

In TV-land PBS fans mourning the end of Downton can console themselves with the start of the second season of Grantchester, starring the dishy village vicar who loves jazz music and a married woman. It will run from March 27 until May 1.

These slightly less than cozy tales are adapted from the books by James Runcie, which collect a series of short mystery stories into several volumes. A tie-in edition, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA; OverDrive Sample), comes out March 22.

Fans of The Bridge get ready for part 2. Hallmark fast tracked it after the success of part one which aired in December.

A tie-in edition came out in October 2015, The Bridge by Karen Kingsbury (S&S/Howard Books; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Over on NBC Heartbeat begins. The show is loosely based on the real life story of Dr. Kathy Magliato, one of the nation’s few women heart surgeons. She wrote a medical memoir, Healing Hearts, which was reissued as Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon (PRH/Harmony; OverDrive Sample) back in 2011. It now bears the sticker, “The Book That Inspired Heartbeat Now on NBC.”

The show begins airing on March 23.

HBO has released a full-length trailer for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, premiering April 24.

As we reported earlier, this is the first season without a tie-in book. The first four seasons were fairly faithful to George R.R. Martin’s novels and all were released as tie-ins. Season five deviated from the book, but nonetheless A Dance with Dragons was released in mass market and trade paperback tie-in editions.

As Martin has famously not written beyond the current point of the HBO show, this season carries the story line beyond what readers know. That does not mean, however, that there are no book connections. The show runners are turning back to previous story lines in the books for at least some of this season’s events.

Both Vanity Fair and The Atlantic have snooped out the threads based on scenes unveiled in the trailer.

It seems parts of the known story surrounding the Greyjoy’s will play out. Vanity Fair spots trailer scenes depicting “the Kingsmoot, an epic-length event for the Ironborn, that sees them try to find a replacement king of the Iron Islands.”

The magazine also notes Ned Stark’s return via flashbacks that tell the story of Robert’s Rebellion and Ned’s battle to free his sister from the Tower of Joy.

The Atlantic picks up on the “power struggle among the Iron Islanders” as well as pointing out that a lot of book material supports “Arya’s continued life in the guild of assassins.” The magazine also reminds readers that Martin has supplied story outlines to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. So while they are definitely working without a net, they are not totally without guidance.

Fans are mourning the end of Downton Abbey this Sunday, March 6. The series has encouraged many to look into the history of the time and has made best sellers of tie-ins, including the latest,  Downton Abbey – A Celebration: The Official Companion to All Six Seasons by Jessica Fellowes, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press. 11/10/15) as well as a book about one of the series’ inspirations, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle by The Countess of Carnarvon, (PRH/Broadway).

Solace may be found in news that those associated with Downton will live on in other shows.

Showrunner Julian Fellowes follows up with an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne starring Ian McShane in the title role, Alison Brie and Tom Hollander, along with Cressida Bonas making her TV debut (Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend, she brings an added element of media excitement). It begins in the U.K. this Sunday, but there is no news on when it will appear in the U.S.

Fellowes is also working an NBC series The Gilded Age, switching locales to New York in the late 19th century. Set to air later this year, Fellowes tells Parade magazine that he was attracted to the time and place, because, “you find this extraordinary renaissance period of artistic patronage and moneymaking, and a sort of development of a European aristocratic way of life, but in an American style … The Old World was dying, and America was just getting ready to fly!”

He will also publish a serialized novel Belgravia, beginning in April. According to Deadline, it is “Modeled along the lines of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers” and will be delivered weekly in text and audio versions. A hardcover of the entire series, as well as an audio, is set for July.

Favorite actors from the series also have new projects on their agendas. The New York Post offers a rundown, which includes the following;

Hugh Bonneville (Lord Robert Crawley) joins Gillian Anderson in the film The Viceroy’s House where he will play Lord Mountbatten (with Anderson as Lady Mountbatten).

Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates) changes her goody two shoes and follows the footsteps of a serial killer. She will star in the ITV production Dark Angel, a miniseries about Victorian serial killer Mary Ann Cotton,  playing the lead.  It will air on PBS Masterpiece some time this year..

Penelope Wilton (Isabel Crawley) got nabbed by Steven Spielberg for his adaption of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. She will co-star with Rebecca Hall and Bill Hader this July. As the New York Post puts it, “If the first director who hires you after Downton is Steven Spielberg, you can rest on your laurels.”

The second season of Outlander, debuting, April 9 on Starz, is featured with a steamy photo on the cover of this week’s Entertainment Weekly, (and an even steamier one on the interior pages. Sorry, it’s not online yet), which belies the network’s reluctance to call the series a romance.

According to the story, Outlander has made Starz the second-most popular premium network behind HBO. It has also helped sell 5 million more copies of Diana Gabaldon’s books, raising the total to 27 million worldwide.

In a sidebar, Gabaldon says she is at work on book 9 in the series, which may be titled A Stubborn Mind. Refusing to say how close she is to finishing it, she notes it takes her three years to write a new book (the most recent in the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood was published in hardcover in 2014). Success takes a toll on writing time and “the more popular your books get, the mor popular you get.”

She also addresses how long the series will continue,  “I think 10 is probably as many as will take me to the end of Jamie and Claire’s lifetimes, because it’s their story. It ends when they do.”

Season two is based on the second novel in the book series, Dragonfly In Amber (PRH/Delacorte, 1992; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample), which creates challenges for the show creators, says Entertainment Weekly, because it is “far more complicated structurally. It also alternates points of view and begins in the 1960’s with the introduction of Jamie and Claire’s adult daughter, Brianna,”

The first full-length trailer was released earlier this month.

Tie-ins (cover not final):

Dragonfly in Amber (Starz Tie-in Edition)
Diana Gabaldon
PRH/Delta, March 8, 2016
Trade Paperback

Sarai Walker’s debut novel debut about weight, beauty, and gender inequality, Dietland (HMH; Highbridge Audio; OverDrive Sample) is set to become a TV series, developed by Marti Noxon who co-created the Lifetime channel’s UnREAL and has worked on Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, and Glee.

Entertainment Weekly is clearly excited, having been fans of both Dietland, the book, and Noxon’s  series UnREAL, calling  the new project “a match made in feminist-media heaven.”

Dietland received a great deal of attention when it came out last year. It was a June 2015 Indie Next pick, made multiple “best of the month” lists, and, in addition to being an EW favorite, was also picked by Amazon, Kirkus, and BookPage as a top title of 2015.

The newest Game of Thrones teaser has been released, promoting the April 24th return of the series.

Fans are on edge for the premiere, hoping to discover if the beloved character Jon Snow really died at the end of season five.

Viewers will find no comfort in the newest teaser, a clip that certainly lives up to its name and taunts fans. As Deadline puts it, “HBO Trolls Hard On Jon Snow’s Fate.”

Definitely missing this season is a tie-in book. The first four seasons were fairly faithful to George R.R. Martin’s novels and all were released as tie-ins. Season five deviated from the book. Nonetheless, A Dance with Dragons, was released as mass market and trade paperback tie-in editions.

But Martin has famously not caught up with the series. Book six is not completed, leading even Conan OBrien to speculate last week on what the author has been doing instead of writing

Michael Pollan’s fame is about to spread to Netflix with the series Cooked set to debut this coming Friday, Jan 19.

Directed by Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), it explores how human developed their relationship to food, a subject Pollan wrote about in his 2013 book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin; OverDrive Sample). The four-episode YV series will be a mix of culinary travelogue, anthropology lessons, and sessions in Pollan’s home kitchen.

No tie-in is planned but the book is available in various print editions and in eBook.

The stirring trailer was released recently and showcases Pollan’s approach to the powerful emotions surrounding food, the connections food has to tradition and family, and the ways the modern food industry has separated us from the real heart of cooking, which, says Pollan works to “undermine cooking as an everyday practice.”

Blame it on the Super Bowl, but last week’s new movies failed to perform, with Variety reporting that both The Choice and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did not do well at the box office.

There are more hopes for Deadpool. opening today even though it’s not your normal superhero movie. Entertainment Weekly lauds it  for having “the balls to mess with the formula and have some naughty, hard-R fun. It’s a superhero film for the wise-asses shooting spitballs in the back of the school bus.”

There are no tie-ins, but collected editions of the comics are available in book form. Wired recommends “The 5 Comics You Have to Read Before Seeing Deadpool.”

The comedy How to Be Single, very loosely based on the book by Liz Tuccillo, will be taking aim at those opting out of Valentine’s Day.

On TV, only one new adaptation airs in the upcoming week, a Hulu special series based on Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (S&S/Gallery; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

An alternative history about a man traveling through time to prevent the assassination of JFK, it has big names attached, produced by  J.J. Abrams (The Force Awakens, Lost) and starring  James Franco the time traveler.  However, Entertainment Weekly gives it a lowly C+.

The attention has brought the novel back to best seller lists. It is #6 on the 2/21 NYT Paperback Mass-Market Fiction list. In late January, it came out in both mass market and trade with a sticker linking it to the adaptation.

The eight-part series premiers on President’s Day, Feb. 15.

Today. we will learn if  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies adapted from the book by Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books, 2009), overturns the box office curse that afflicted its predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. On the other hand, it’s a safe bet that the Nicholas Sparks’ adaptation The Choice will open well and continue into Valentine’s Day weekend.

Two adaptations open next week:

  
How to Be Single is a rom-com (with a stress on the com) that traces the fates of a group of singles on the dating scene in NYC. It stars Rebel Wilson, Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, and Damon Wayans Jr.

It is loosely based (with a stress on “loosely”) on How to Be Single, Liz Tuccillo (S&S/Washington Square Press; OverDrive Sample – also in mass market). Tie-ins came out just a few weeks ago.

The second movie is a big anti-Valentine’s Day play (note the poster).

Deadpool features the Marvel Comics character who has evolved from villain to antihero. Ryan Reynolds portrayed him in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and reprises the role in this feature.

There is no an official tie-in, but the wise-cracking, super-skilled mercenary features in many comics, so many that Den of Geek provides a lengthy guide to reading the oeuvre.

Squeezed in among the celebrities, sports figures and musicians on yesterday’s late night talk shows were two authors.

Stephen Colbert mixed it up with Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), stirring up the audience as well.

Seth Meyers featured novelist Alexander Chee, but the exchange didn’t give much of a feel for his new book The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Blackstone Audio). It is getting wide review coverage, however, as we noted earlier.

In the second part of the interview, he talked about how he inadvertently started Amtrak’s “Writers in Residence” program:

Stephen Colbert continues to sneak authors on to The Late Show.

First up is Harvard professor and TED Talk hit, Amy Cuddy, set to appear tonight. She is the author of the bestselling Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges (Hachette/Little, Brown; OverDrive Sample). Her book has been featured on the cover of the NYT Book Review and was a People magazine “Book of the Week.” Skeptics will enjoy a recent Slate article that calls Cuddy’s work an “example of scientific overreach.”

Currently t at #3 on the NYT Advice Best Sellers list after five weeks, it has strong holds at many libraries we checked.

On Wednesday night Michael Eric Dyson has his turn with Colbert. His newest book (out tomorrow) is The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), in which he explores how President Obama has navigated and responded to issues of race over the last eight years, taking a largely critical stance.

Also on the schedule are several actors promoting FX’s upcoming American Crime Story series on O.J. Simpson, including John Travolta and Courtney B. Vance tonight and David Schwimmer tomorrow. The show debuts tomorrow night and is based onJ effrey Toobin’s 1996 book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. A tie-in edition (Random House) was released in September..

Debuting in theaters today is Disney’s big budget, The Finest Hours, based on the true rescue story written for young adults by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman (see our earlier story).

The big kids animated movie opening is Dreamworks Kung Fu Panda 3. Check our list of tie-ins.

The upcoming week brings several adaptations for TV as well as for a high-profile movie.

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is the first in a new series on FX, produced, in part, by Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story).

The 10-part project premiers Feb. 2, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O. J. Simpson, Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran, and Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey.

It is based on Jeffrey Toobin’s 1996 book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. The tie-in edition (Random House; OverDrive Sample) went on sale last September.

The series is getting strong reviews for its intimate, 360 degree take on the crime that kept viewers glued to their TV screens twenty years ago.

Riffing off the popularity of Serial and Netflix’s Making a Murderer, FX’s plans for American Crime Story to re-create other true life stories. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the events of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath will be the subject of a second season.

As we reported earlier, on Feb. 3, ABC will begin airing a miniseries detailing the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme with Richard Dreyfuss playing Madoff and Blythe Danner playing his wife, Ruth.

The show is based on the 2009 book by ABC News’s chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, The Madoff Chronicles (Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth) (Kingswell; OverDrive Sample). A tie-in edition came out earlier this month.

Taking aim at the Valentine’s Day crowd (who last year crowded theaters to see Fifty Shades of Grey), Nicholas Sparks’ The Choice hits theaters a bit ahead of the holiday, on Feb. 5.

The film stars Teresa Palmer and Tom Welling and tells the story of two neighbors in a small town who fall in love when one moves next door to the other.

The tie-in came out in late December, The Choice by Nicholas Sparks (Hachette/Grand Central Publishing; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books, 2009), starring Lily James (Cinderella, Downton Abbey) as Elizabeth Bennett, Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy and Bella Heathcote as Elizabeth’s sister opens on Feb. 5th as well.

The tie-in edition came out in mid-December: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Movie Tie-in Edition), Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books; OverDrive Sample).

As we reported, it has been a bit of a rocky road getting the film made but with star Lily James set to return to Downton Abbey in upcoming episodes of the final season (with strong hints that her character, Lady Rose is pregnant) the many shifts in lead actresses ended up with a hot star. Now the producers hope audiences will forget that an earlier mashup adaptation, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, was a major flop.

For more books to movies and TV, see our list of upcoming book adaptations, as well as our list of tie-ins.

Michael Pollan’s 2013 book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin; OverDrive Sample) is about to become a Netflix series.

Set to air on February 19th, the four-episode adaptation offers viewers a mix of culinary travelogue, anthropology lessons and sessions in Pollan’s home kitchen.

Based around elemental cooking methods, the globe-spanning series will focus on fire, water, air, and earth. Eater, one of the leading culinary websites, reports:

“In the ‘Fire’ episode, Pollan will delve into the cross-cultural tradition of barbecue by looking at fire-roasts of monitor lizards in Western Australia and visiting with a barbecue pitmaster; in the ‘Water’ episode, he’ll take lessons from kitchens in India and cover the issues surrounding processed foods. An episode titled ‘Air’ explores the science of bread-making and gluten, while the final episode, ‘Earth,’ looks at how fermentation preserves raw foods.”

Variety says,

“Personalities and places featured in Cooked include … a Connecticut Benedictine nun and microbiologist who makes traditional French cheese; Peruvian brewers who use human saliva to ferment a traditional beverage; and an ancient Moroccan granary powered by rivers.”

Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) is the executive producer of the series. Eater reports a different filmmaker is in charge of each episode.

No tie-in is planned but the book is available in various print editions as well as eBook.