Film Rites Movie Updates

Fox Searchlight has optioned The New York Times feature The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble and has set Film Rites' Steve Zaillian and Garrett Basch to produce.

20th Century Fox has just closed a 7-figure deal for film rights to the international spy thriller Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews.

Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian will produce a reimagining of the BBC's The Day Britain Stopped for Fox.

I’m hearing that 20th Century Fox is the frontrunner to acquire Wool, a self-published online book that has become an internet sensation and is being called the sci-fi version of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Paramount Pictures and Indian Paintbrush are closing a deal to acquire the rights to the international bestselling novel Syndrome E. Originally published in France, the Franck Thilliez novel is the first in a series, and it will be released in the U.S. by Viking this summer.

Paramount and Indian Paintbrush have hired Chris Terrio to write A Murder Foretold, the fact-based drama based on the David Grann article in the April 4 issue of The New Yorker about a series of high-level murders in Guatemala.

At the Kapow comic convention in London last month, show organiser Mark Millar stated that there was a big name Spanish director signed up to direct a film based on his newly announced Marvel Icon book Supercrooks with artist Leinil Yu. Something he repeated in his editorial in this week’s CLiNT magazine as announcing next month ...

Jamie Vanderbilt, the Amazing Spider-Man writer who wrote Zodiac, is heading back into gritty crime territory. The scribe has been tapped to pen the script for Red Riding, Columbia’s adaptation of the popular British TV movies. Ridley Scott is attached to direct and is producing via his Scott Free banner along with Steve Zail ...

At the launch of his exhibit The Factory Movie Lovers at the Centre Pompidou, the usually chatty Michel Gondry dropped news of another project he appears to be working on, adding to his already busy slate. The director revealed that he is adapting Philip K. Dick‘s Ubik for the big screen.

Jason Segel as an '80s-era undercover cop? It's almost too perfect. That's the premise of a new comedy project called Undercover Cop that DreamWorks Studios is putting together with Steven Zaillian's Film Rites banner.

Time Crimes, the remake of the 2007 Spanish time travel film, has been moved by Steve Zaillian from United Artists to DreamWorks. Zaillian, who'd set it up at UA to produce, has also committed to rewrite the script.

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro have been working on together based on the exploits of mob hitman Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran as chronicled in the book I Heard You Paint Houses. The pic's being developed at Paramount by De Niro and Jane Rosenthal's Tribeca Productions.