IP Picks🔎: 'Knives Out' in a BBQ Joint

➕ A Black superhero from the past gets a new reboot and the 'Preppy Murder' revisited

Family Bonds: Some of the cast from the murder mystery romp ‘Knives Out’ includes clockwise from far left Katherine Langford, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Riki LIndhome, Jasden Martell and Jamie Lee Curtis (screenshot/Lionsgatge)

Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.

Before we begin, a quick reminder: Our special summer offer for new and returning subscribers is only good until Labor Day. For a low, low price, you can now get access to our exclusive, curated selection of the hottest and most promising optionable material before the competition. Take this week where we’ve got early looks at an upcoming longform article and a cool graphic novel that you’ll only find here. Act fast!

An article worth reading: I wanted to highlight this Bloomberg feature about the recent “romantasy” boom. The piece speculates that romantasy — for the uninitiated, that’s romance crossed with fantasy — could be "Hollywood’s Next Marvel Moment." The story is full of revealing details about book sales, options, what's in development and what's stalled. While I would have liked to see a little more history and context about what about this trend is actually new and more than just a rehash of the popularity of Twilight and True Blood in the aughts, it’s definitely worth a read.

The Marvel comparison offers an apt case study in how to balance hardcore fans and casual latecomers. Sticking too closely to the source material can be the enemy of a good screen adaptation and can also alienate those casual fans. But too little fidelity runs the risk of a backlash from the hardcore audience that could end up tanking the movie. Striking the right balance is tricky, but Marvel has (mostly) been able to get it right. As the article points out, this a challenge in adapting these high-profile romantasy novels with elaborate imagined worlds.

The most significant takeaway of the piece is encapsulated in this quote from Black List founder Franklin Leonard about the "blind spots" of mainly male executives: “Stories in this genre — romance, romantasy . . . books that are targeted at women and are written by women — are under-optioned. There’s just not as many of them made compared to Marvel movies, and they don’t get as big budgets. That is, despite the fact that when movies are made by women, for women, the ROI actually exceeds that of primarily male-targeted movies.”

Leonard’s take is one that I mostly agree with. In fact, it's something that I've been thinking about recently in the wake of the box-office success of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us. People slept on author Colleen Hoover's fanbase for a long time. But now, as we can all see, her audience has turned out. As a result, it’s now worth thinking about Franklin’s words in the context of pursuing new material. Are there opportunities where the market undervalues certain fanbases? Which title from the new romantasy boom might be the next Twilight? And which could go down as the next Vampire Academy?

Interestingly, the Bloomberg article appeared just as Liz Pelletier (the founder of Entangled Publishing, the company behind huge hit The Fourth Wing) launched Premeditated Productions — a production company that signed a first-look deal with Amazon. Pelletier brought in Bad Robot vet Sherryl Clark to oversee the new company. Between the Bloomberg piece and the Premeditated announcement, you’ll get a sense of where Hollywood is currently in terms of romantasy and how a new company might show us where it could still go.

---

Now, on to this week’s picks. Headlining this edition is advance looks at a longform article that could be the basis for a period courtroom drama and a graphic novel rebooting a classic superhero. Plus, we’ve got a batch of female-skewing stories across multiple genres (thriller, procedural, courtroom drama), including an early look at a longform article that publishes next week.

The full lineup for today features:

• An ‘80s-set murder mystery inspired by one of the decade’s biggest tabloid scandals

• A quirky procedural with an unusual (and zesty!) setting and an endearingly flawed protagonist

• A reboot of a forgotten superhero from the 1940s that feels especially timely right now

• A true-crime political drama about a group of female activists who took down a corrupt mayor