IP Picks🔎: Benoit Blanc of the Art World; 2 Great Rom-Coms
➕ A fresh 'My Best Friend's Wedding' spin & a 'Waiting to Exhale' drama about 5 friends
Welcome to The Optionist and, as always, thanks for subscribing. As usual, there were a few under-the-radar stories this week that grabbed my attention, including one that suggests that the star of the upcoming auto racing flick F1 hasn’t quite satisfied his need for speed. Let's quickly dig in before we downshift (sorry!) into this week's picks.
•Brad Pitt and Channing Tatum are developing a docuseries as well as a scripted movie about the famous Isle of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle races with Amazon MGM Studios. I love this idea! I also love the way that they’re developing it. With the growing popularity of Formula 1 in the U.S. (which really took off after the first season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive in 2019), motor sports are having a moment. And that moment will only get bigger if Pitt’s F1 (opening June 27) turns out to be the box-office hit its early buzz suggests. For some reason, though, motorcycle racing has remained a bit off to the side, out of the spotlight. That’s a shame because the high-octane sport has both drama and danger. I’ve flagged several auto racing stories before (here, here), but they’ve tended to focus on the past — the deadlier throwback era when the sport was less high-tech and safety was less regulated. Motorcycle racing, whether period or current, has that same thrill of danger. And right now there’s a real opportunity to bring new attention to racing on screen thanks to all of the new ways filmmakers can shoot high-speed action. I’m a big fan of using a short docuseries to support the development of a film and to prime audiences for what’s to come. It’s a relatively low-cost way to test the market and offset development costs. Done right, it should be at least a modest money maker in its own right. Looked at that way, Pitt and Tatum’s 360 deal with Amazon sounds pretty shrewd.
•Another recent Amazon deal I’m keeping a close eye on is the series development of Lauren Roberts’ bestselling romantasy trilogy, Powerless. I’ve written a lot about the uneven track record of romantasy projects in development. But if this starts to stir up some excitement — even in the casting and early production stages — it might goose some other romantasy titles. As they say, the rising tide lifts all boats. Roberts’ story is a fascinating distillation of current publishing trends: She first started posting on BookTok in her mid-teens (she’s 23 now); then she got enough followers and encouragement to write and self-publish Powerless; then she parlayed that into a traditional book deal and sold over a million books in the first year, spending 19 weeks atop the NYT YA bestseller list; and now she has a TV show in the works with Amazon. That’s like the entire history of 21st-century publishing in one thumbnail bio.
Speaking of BookTok and romantasy and bestsellers: Marie Claire Australia has a fascinating story about former rugby player and Bachelor contestant Luke Bateman’s foray into BookTok. Bateman started posting about his passion for steamy romantasy novels, an arena that’s overwhelmingly dominated by women. At first, people were charmed to see this big, unlikely rugby dude talking about these books. But when he parlayed that fandom into a book deal of his own, the backlash began. Some even accused him of what basically boils down to appropriation simply because he’s a man.
Still on bestsellers: There will now be a bestseller list for Black writers curated by the African American Literature Book Club and BookScan. Trump DEI jackassery aside, this is a great idea and worth checking out. It's illuminating to see which Black writers are popping, especially in the bottom-half of a list that goes 20 deep. To be clear, the list tracks Black writers, not books bought by Black readers. We don't have data for the latter. But a writers list is telling on its own, especially if you also take a look at books that appear on it and not on the traditional bestseller lists. There’s even hope that the new list will help Black authors market themselves more effectively.
🔒 This Week: The Real Life Benoit Blanc of Stolen Art
On to this week’s picks! We’ve got a couple of procedurals, a domestic drama and an amazing true-crime story. The full lineup:
💞A rom-com that’s a mash-up of My Best Friend’s Wedding and When Harry Met Sally with a dash of One Day
📝 A journalism procedural about a puff-piece reporter who stumbles onto a career-making case involving murder and corruption that’s ripe for series development
👭🏾 A prestige ensemble drama that follows the lives of five Black women and offers multiple awards-caliber roles for actresses
🪄A rom-com about a woman who gets glimpses of her happily-ever-after. But when it’s not what she imagined, she has to decide whether to accept her fate or fight it
🖼️ A ripped-from-the-headlines procedural about an eccentric genius of stolen-art recovery
