IP Picks🔎: Two Timeline Thrillers Wrestle with Race and History
âž• A rivals-to-lovers rom-com mystery and paleontologists behaving badly
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
Before we dive in, a final reminder: Our end-of-summer offer for new and returning subscribers is only good until Labor Day. It’s a pretty sweet deal. For a low, low starter price, you will get access to our exclusive, curated selection of the hottest and most promising optionable material before the competition. Act now!
With that out of the way, on to business. I want to flag a great story for you. It involves Michael Crichton, an author that regular readers know I’ve been fascinated by for a long time. This latest dust-up doesn’t involve the sale of a posthumous novel, but rather a fight over Crichton’s legacy and who can profit from it.
The drama centers on the bestselling writer’s widow, Sherri Crichton, who is suing Warner Bros. TV, producer John Wells and actor Noah Wyle, claiming that the new series The Pitt began as an ER reboot and was only changed when the studio decided it didn’t want to fairly compensate or credit the Crichton estate for its IP. (The original ER script was developed for TV by Crichton from a failed movie script he wrote.)
There are some tricky legal issues at play here. Namely, what constitutes a remake or reboot? What compensation and credit should a creator receive? And how much input should that creator have in the new project? This is shaping up to be a bitter, drawn-out war — and one that risks shattering the long friendship between Wells and the Crichton family as well as the business relationship between Crichton and WBTV (which had already been strained by how the Westworld reboot was developed and credited). There are other questions as well, including how literary estates are managed and whether family members are the best ones to oversee them. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, there’s a great story waiting to be written that chronicles the history of the Crichton literary estate following his death in 2008: the different companies that have worked with it, the expectations about the value of his IP and which family members ultimately got a say in what happened. (Crichton was married five times and had a daughter with his fourth wife and a son, born posthumously, with his fifth wife.) There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s been going on behind the scenes, but there’s certainly enough — cycling through managers and agents, a legal fight between family members over the estate — to make me want to learn more.
Deadline first reported the news of the Crichton lawsuit. It has a pretty good rundown of the nuts and bolts of the dispute, but it should be pointed out that it’s heavily tilted toward the Crichton side. (Readers who followed my commentary on the sale of the screen rights to Crichton and James Patterson’s novel Eruption won’t be surprised by this.) The NYT has a more neutral take.
Now, on to this week’s picks, which include two riveting dual-timeline thrillers that grapple with big historical moments and a great YA horror tale.
The full lineup for today features:
A thriller about the end of Apartheid
A drama about a mother and daughter who are both caught up in their own civil rights struggles
A YA horror story about a group of teens investigating mysterious happenings in their hometown
A rivals-to-lovers rom-com mystery about the hunt for a bestselling author who vanished during a party at her country estate
A real-life drama about a scientific feud involving a major dinosaur discovery and the asteroid that caused their extinction
