IP Picks🔎: A VR-World Murder Mystery and a 'Yellowjackets'-Type Thriller
âž• A high-concept rom-com and two overlooked WWII stories
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
It’s been a terrible and chaotic week in the real world. I, for one, have been glad to have some good entertainment to escape into. It has been an exciting couple of weeks for book-to-film IP with the release of two high-profile and promising projects (both on Apple TV): Lessons in Chemistry and Killers of the Flower Moon. I’m particularly curious to see the reception to them since they’re both period pieces. I’m a big believer in period pieces, or rather I’m a skeptic of the old canard that period pieces don’t work.
I happened to be at the L.A. premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon earlier this week. I thought it was fab and really showed the promise of mining history for adaptable true-crime stories. Killers has the spine of procedural, but the period setting makes it feel fresh and unique. We’ve featured a lot of period true-crime/scandal stories from American history and I think if Killers does well (both in public and awards reception) on top of the success of Oppenheimer, it will give momentum to those titles. (If you want a recap of some of them, ping me). Meanwhile, I’ll be looking out for more. Indeed, we have a couple of period pieces this week.
Here’s the full rundown for this week:
A true-history drama about the overlooked war crimes trials that took place in Tokyo after WWII.
A true-history adventure tale about the race to develop submersibles and diving apparatus during WWII and the crazy eccentric scientists who used themselves as guinea pigs.
A rom-com with light sci-fi elements about a woman given the chance to relive five key moments from her life to see if different choices would have produced happier outcomes.
A thriller with Yellowjacket vibes about two sisters forced to confront the buried truths about the plane crash that killed their parents and left them stranded in the woods.
A sci-fi thriller set in a VR world that allows people to relive notorious crimes and the woman who must plunge into it to exonerate her husband.
