🔎 Frankenstein in the Old West & IP Picks of the Week
Plus: Two original takes on marriages gone bad and more available stories
What unites the recent success of everything from Adolescence to A Minecraft Movie to Sinners? Good IP. Studios and streamers are in desperate need of new ideas with franchise potential and even new universes. (Consider Entertainment Strategy Guy’s scorecard this week assessing streamers’ franchise strength, and Lesley Goldberg’s recent look at the shift to ongoing series.)
In that spirit, we’re letting you sample today’s issue of The Optionist, a standalone subscription newsletter from Ankler Media that identifies IP available for adaptation. Led by Andy Lewis, The Optionist curates a list of promising IP each week from books (new and backlist), long-form journalism, short stories, graphic novels and wherever IP can be found. Offering more than just a logline, the picks includes comps, a short summary, casting suggestions and rep info. It's like having an extra set of hands on your dev team.
And The Optionist delivers ideas that get bought and developed. More than we can track. But a few of Andy’s favorites include a James Bond spoof, a backlist title about a legendary unsolved robbery, a medical procedural about the federal government’s elite rare-disease detectives and a high-concept sci-fi procedural that places a murder investigation against the arrival of a three-mile-tall alien corpse. He even reports today on an early pick that is now in development.
Subscribers get the newsletter at noon PT every Friday, but we’re making today’s newsletter available to all Ankler readers to try. Subscribe to The Optionist individually or as a group subscription.
Herewith, some rights news followed by Andy’s picks:
Welcome to The Optionist. When I was a kid, I had a cheesy poster on my bedroom wall that showed a long, undulating country road with a single runner on it. The tag read: “The race isn’t always won by the swift, but by those that keep running.” I know, right? But hey, I was 15. As a friend reminds me all the time, the reason clichés like these work is because they contain a real truth at their core. Let’s start with a trio of stories this week that remind me of that poster and its message of persistence.
— Bernie Gunther is finally coming to the screen. Philip Kerr’s internationally popular 14-book series about a hard-boiled Berlin detective set between the 1930s and the 1950s is being adapted by Playtone for Apple TV+. Some backstory: It’s been more than a dozen years since Tom Hanks and his partner Gary Goetzman first acquired the rights. The project was originally in development at HBO and then set up at Sky. Now it’s Apple’s turn on the clock.
Interestingly, Playtone’s plan is to start with Metropolis — the last book Kerr wrote, but the first for Gunther chronologically. Published in 2019, a year after Kerr’s death, Metropolis is set in 1928 and fleshes out the gumshoe’s origin story, catching him at the moment when he transitions from German police officer to homicide detective.
I’m especially curious to see where the show will go after season one. After all, Kerr’s noir-ish novels jump around in time, with several unfolding across multiple periods. Gunther fans debate whether the books should be read in their published order or in the chronological order of the character. (The consensus among die-hards seems to be the former.)
One reason this story caught my attention is it highlighted a bunch of themes The Optionist has repeatedly championed: The resilience of procedurals (especially serialized ones); the possibilities of developing internationally popular fiction for global markets; how a period setting is an impediment only until it isn’t; and the fact that contemporary literary estates have never been more valuable than they are right now.
— I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about this one. Amazon shared first-look photos from We Were Liars, another long-gestating adaptation that’s coming to the screen in June. The series is based on E. Lockhart’s bestselling 2014 novel about a wealthy family that summers on an island near Martha’s Vineyard. The family suffered a terrible tragedy two summers earlier, which the central character Candace can’t remember anything about. It’s part family drama, part psychological thriller, part coming-of-age story. It also has some fantastic twists.
This one has also had a convoluted development history. It was going to be a movie and then it was going to be a Netflix series. Finally, the streaming giant let the rights lapse. Enter Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) and Carina Adly MacKenzie (Roswell, New Mexico), who both loved the book and snapped up the rights to it (as well as its prequel) in 2022. Sometimes a project just needs to find the right people at the right time to make it happen.
It’s not hype to say that We Were Liars is one of the most beloved YA books of this century — I discovered it soon after publication when my tween nieces, who were big readers, raved about it — but I’ve consistently pushed all sorts of YA in The Optionist. Why? Because YA authors pen some of the most adaptable books out there. Plus, coming-of-age stories appeal to a surprisingly broad demo. Like horror, they also have a loyal audience that will show up over and over. If the adaptation is good, they’ll be great proselytizers for it, which is even more important in the age of BookTok, etc.
— One of my earliest Optionist picks was 2022’s Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead. It was a super-fun, 1930s-set homage to the Golden Age of locked-room mysteries featuring the crime-solving magician Joseph Spector. I know period stories can be a tough sell (though see my caveat above), but the main character reminded me of what I loved about Carter Beats the Devil — Glen David Gold’s fabulous 2001 novel that has tragically never made it to the screen. Not only did I like the Holmes/Watson spin on Spector’s partnership with Scotland Yard detective George Flint, there was also the success of the Knives Out movies and the big-screen Agatha Christie revivals to back me up.
It had been a while since I checked on the rights for this one. But when I saw that the fourth book in the series was coming out in July, I planned to mention it again. Then I learned the rights were optioned a few months ago by Aurelia Pictures in the U.K. for series development. (Like the majority of options, this one didn’t get any publicity. I had to dig in to find the answer.)
Once again, the point here is that the race isn’t always won by the swift. That and of course that The Optionist readers would have had this on their radars from day one, as well as a thoughtful take on why it would work on screen.
On to this week’s picks, which are both eclectic and fun, including two backlist picks. We’ve got a full-on Frankenstein homage and a sci-fi thriller about reanimation. Plus, a pair of highly original stories about unraveling marriages — one a thriller, the other a dark comedy.
The full lineup:
An Old West-set take on the horror classic, Frankenstein
A thriller about witches battling to determine the outcome of World War II
A domestic dark comedy from Australia about a mother who abandons her family after a bizarre accident changes her personality
A dystopian sci-fi thriller centered on a reanimated soldier that’s Jack Reacher by way of Blake Crouch
A domestic thriller about a romance writer in a unique marriage and the hippie mom next door who threatens to undo their careful arrangement
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