IP Picks🔎: Liz Cheney's Profile in Courage
➕ An art heist caper and a babysitter with a dead body problem
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for being here. I wanted to start with a perfect example of how the trades fail core readers like us.
There's a story out this week about a director/producer optioning the King Raven book trilogy, which is a new take on Robin Hood (pitched as gritty and rooted in real history). Even though it has been done a million times, I'm always interested in the story of Robin Hood. Indeed, it was precisely because it has been done so many times that it caught my interest — what’s fresh here, and why do creators think it will work with audiences right now? The story pitches King Raven in the vein of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, and touts the author, Steven Lawhead, as a guy who writes big-canvas historical fiction that mixes real figures and events with what is described as "lore and mythology." Sounds pretty straightforward and fun.
Here’s what’s not in the story: Steven Lawhead is a faith-based writer. His books, whether about Robin Hood or King Arthur or something else, are generally faith-based takes. His publisher is Thomas Nelson, which is a faith-based publisher. He's won multiple awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (since 1999, they've been called the Christy Awards). Brent Ryan Green, the producer/director who picked up the rights, primarily focuses on faith-based projects — Acts of the Apostles, The Chosen, God's Not Dead: We the People, Christmas Manger — for his personal stuff. (He's also been a crew member/consultant for such projects as Killers of the Flower Moon and the Twister reboot.)
This all seems like important information and it's all absent from the article. Not to mention that Lawhead's faith-inspired take on King Arthur, The Pendragon Cycle, is filming right now for The Daily Wire's streaming service. (I wrote about The Daily Wire’s streaming plans here.) Now, I know a bit about Lawhead just because that's my business, but I was hazy on the details. It took me all of 30 seconds of googling to refresh my memory (i.e., if you knew nothing you could find out most of this very, very quickly). Heck, the press release name checks C. S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia) as an inspiration, which is a giveaway clue for faith-based material.
So I’m wondering if this is meant to be a stealth faith-driven take for mainstream audiences or if it is going to be aimed straight at the faith audience, either as a pure streaming play on something like The Daily Wire’s service or just niche marketed as a film to faith audiences (which has been a financially successful box office strategy). Either way, the faith aspect is important for understanding this project and we don't get any of that in the story. (I want to be clear: My problem isn’t with faith-based takes on stories — they serve an audience and done right, they can reach far beyond that core demo — my problem is with the failure to report this in a useful way.)
A little background research is the first thing I do when really considering a title. Sometimes I think I should show my work — like on a high-school math test, where you could get some credit for a wrong answer done partially correctly). There was a graphic novel I was thinking about including today, something based on a true story. But when I poked around a little, I saw the writer (it’s a memoir) was developing a doc series in a way that made the idea of optioning the graphic novel superfluous. On the other hand, when I did the San Francisco earthquake book recently, I thought a competing project was enough in limbo (and this take different enough) to make it worth including, though I noted the other project is in development.
The trades don’t serve readers when all they do is regurgitate press releases as “exclusives” without important context. Look, I wrote for a trade so I know sometimes you do stories like this as a quickie without much thought, perhaps to win some goodwill with a particular source, and this project is far from actually getting made at this stage, considering there's no actor, writer, studio or financing attached to it. But you're proclaiming it as an exclusive, so it must be important, right? Otherwise, why are you doing it? And if it is important, give me more than just a regurgitated press release — especially for a story like this that is aimed at the core trade audience. Sure, just the option is interesting, but that's a tweet’s worth of information. Tell me more. Offer me context. Show me that this is part of a trend, or runs counter to one. Make me smarter or you're not doing your job.
Here’s the rundown for this week:
A mystery about the hunt for a lost art masterwork.
An inspirational drama centered on Liz Cheney’s opposition to Donald Trump.
A creepy thriller about a woman with amnesia who believes her twin sister is hiding the truth about their past from her.
A light horror tale centered on a teenage babysitter, her two charges and a dead body discovered at midnight.