IP Picks🔎: An Olympic Athlete's Inspirational Tale
➕ A backlist YA sci-fi gem and a 'Squid Game'-like thriller
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
This is the last Optionist of 2023 — we’re taking a holiday break next week but we’ll be back with your first list of 2024 on Jan. 5. With the dual strikes and all the upheaval in streaming, it has been a long year. I think everybody is looking for some downtime over the holidays and a fresh start in 2024.
That being said, it has been a good year for us. So many titles we featured got optioned that it was hard to keep track of them all. There was the great period mob thriller with an unlikely protagonist, an ‘80s fashion memoir, a startup gone awry, horror and heist tales, the Musk bio and the high-concept sci-fi story that sparked a bidding war.
And there are so many more fantastic titles with rights still up for grabs. You can go through the archive to see things arranged by genre. (We’ll be updating it with the rest of 2023 over the holidays.)
We also did some interesting reporting on how a Winnie the Pooh horror movie skirted Disney’s lawyers, evaluated the chances that Harry’s big-bet memoir would pay off for the publisher (spoiler: it did), talked with the IP lawyers behind the informative podcast The Briefing and interviewed Scott Glassgold about the short story boom.
We have some exciting things planned for the beginning of 2024, including an interview about Texas Monthly’s IP moves in Hollywood and then a broader feature on the pros and cons of all the first-look deals magazines and newspapers have signed. Plus, we’re gonna be diving more deeply into both podcasts and comics/graphic novels as IP.
I think 2024 is going to be our best year yet.
On to this week’s picks, which include a trio of true crime/grift tales, plus an inspirational athlete memoir. The full rundown:
An inspirational memoir from an Olympic medalist.
A Squid Game-like thriller about a dangerous game show and the revenge motive driving it.
A grift tale set in the world of oenophiles and high-end wine collectors.
A true crime story about a grifter doctor peddling a snake oil opioid-addiction cure and using his “church” to avoid the law.
A real-life story about a reclusive billionaire who wants to leave half his fortune to his gardener for being nice to him during Covid.
A coming-of-age sci-fi story about a teen boy who finds himself stranded on an alien planet.
