IP Picks🔎: A 'White Lotus' Thriller in Big Sur
âž• A YA rom-com with series potential and a reverse 'Ted Lasso' NFL tale
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We'll be keeping an eye on this: The sale of screen rights to Eruption, an unfinished Michael Crichton manuscript about a Hawaiian volcano that could threaten the survival of the world because its eruption could mess with munitions on a secret military based nearby. The manuscript was completed by James Patterson and is set for publication on June 3.
Of course, there are few authors who rival Crichton's success in publishing with some 250 million books sold, or in terms of Hollywood adaptations, with around $3.5 billion in grosses for films based on his works (and that doesn't include TV like ER, which he created).
Eruption also appears to hit the sweet spot of Crichton work in that it leans into his must successful trope — the believable-but-not-yet-realized-science-gone-awry-to-threaten-the-world plot. And you have to give Story Factory boss Shane Salerno credit for whipping up the frenzy with a hype video trailer and breathless coverage in Deadline. He's a shrewd advocate for his clients. (Read this Los Angeles Times profile.)
Of course someone is going to buy this and end up paying a pretty penny for it.
But there's reason for caution as well. This will the fourth posthumous Crichton novel to be completed and published since his 2008 death at age 66. (The list: Pirate Latitudes in 2009, Micro in 2001, Dragon Teeth in 2017 and Eruption this year.) CrichtonSun, which oversees the author's literary estate and is run by his widow (and fifth wife) Sherri Crichton, has been aggressive in trying to market his literary estate. Story Factory is at least the third group to work with CrichtonSun after ICM and Range Media Partners.
One has to wonder about the quality of what remains unpublished and how much Crichton DNA will be in the final product. Patterson is a great pop writer — his name has sold more than 400 million books — but his Hollywood track record is so-so. (To be fair, I haven't read Eruption yet, having not pursued a galley copy.)
Also, despite Crichton's track record at the box office, nothing published after 1999's Timeline (the Paul Walker-starrer was a critical and box office disappointment) has yet been adapted to film. The carcasses that litter this boulevard of broken option dreams includes the plane crash thriller Airframe (optioned by Disney), techno-thriller Prey (optioned by 21st Century Fox) and "honey, I shrunk the action stars" caper Micro and swashbuckler Pirate Latitudes (both bought by Spielberg) — all of which cost millions for the screen rights. Of course there's a reason why each of these hasn't happened yet, but seeing all the titles together does cause one to wonder what's going on.
Crichton's still a bankable name, maybe more so than ever in this era of brand names and pre-tested IP, and even if a younger generation doesn't exactly know who he is all you have to do is say "Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton" to get their attention. But paying the multi-millions it'll likely take to get the rights feels to me like one of the huge free-agent contracts given to an aging sports star, the kind that the Jonah Hill character in Moneyball described as paying more for past performance than expected future results.
On to this week’s picks, which include the two period thrillers from a master of the genre, a six-book series centered on the sheriff of a resort town that could be the basis for a TV procedural and a fab adventure drama. The full rundown:
A YA supernatural horror story about missing teens.
A White Lotus-like murder mystery set at a posh Big Sur resort cut off from the world by a mudslide.
A magical realist YA rom-com centered on a geek who gets confidence from a very, very lucky 20-sided die.
An inspirational sports drama about an English rugby star who chucks it all to try to make it in the NFL.
A financial thriller centered on the high-stakes billion-dollar world of pro sports team sales.
