Hayley breaks down the films and TV series based on books due to hit screens in the coming months.
The Woman in Cabin 10
While I maintain my constant grumble that there are not enough mystery and thriller movies gracing our screens these days, The Woman in Cabin 10 is here to temporarily fill the ever-present hole in my heart. Ruth Ware has been consistently pumping out some of the most-read mystery books for a decade now, so it’s a little surprising that she’s only now getting her first adaptation, with her second novel coming to Netflix as a film, helmed by Aussie director Simon Stone. Keira Knightley leads the cast as Lo Blacklock, a travel journalist assigned to cover a small luxury cruise with only a dozen or so wealthy guests. When Lo witnesses a woman being thrown overboard, she uncovers a dark mystery as the crew claim that none of the guests are missing.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Last year’s Bob Dylan flick A Complete Unknown carved a new kind of mould for the frankly tired genre of the musician biopic, mercifully steering away from telling the entire life story of the subject and focusing more on a smaller, but personally significant, slice of it instead. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere seems to be following the same path, adapting Warren Zanes’ 2023 book about the creation of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska when the singer was on the cusp of superstardom. Jeremy Allen White, of The Bear fame, is taking up the role of The Boss himself (sporting a spot-on singing voice, I must say), with Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his manager Jon Landeau, and Scott Cooper (Antlers, The Pale Blue Eye) directing.
Regretting You
It Ends With Us, an undeniable hit despite the poor reviews and still-ongoing legal battle between the stars, popped the lid on Colleen Hoover adaptations and now they’re flowing thick and fast, with three more set to arrive in the next year. Regretting You is up first, with The Fault in Our Stars director Josh Boone behind the camera, and Allison Williams (Girls) and Mckenna Grace (probably the younger version of the main character in something you’ve seen) sharing the screen as co-leads. The pair play Morgan and her teenage daughter Clara, whose already strained relationship is further tested when Morgan’s husband and sister both die unexpectedly in a car crash together, leading her to question whether they were having an affair.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Movie musicals are alive and thriving, and The Greatest Showman director Bill Condon is keeping theatre kids fed with an adaptation of 1993 Tony Award-winner Kiss of the Spider-Woman, itself an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s 1973 novel. Set in an Argentinian prison in the 1980s, the film stars Diego Luna and Tonatiuh as two inmates sharing a cell who connect with each other and escape their reality by recounting the plot of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ a movie starring glamorous screen siren Ingrid Luna, played by Jennifer Lopez. Mirroring Chicago, (for which Condon won a best adapted screenplay Oscar in 2003) by switching from grim and gloomy prison scenes to fantastical and vibrant musical sequences, the flick is touted by the director as a "love letter to movie musicals."
Frankenstein
Frankenstein, or Frankenstein’s Monster if you please, is one of those figures that has pervaded popular culture since the very dawn of it. There have been countless adaptations and references to Mary Shelley’s pre-eminent science fiction novel for the last century, but when it comes down to it, most people will conjure only one image: that of the iconic Boris Karloff in Universal’s 1931 film. But if someone is to take a bold new stab at the material, who better than Guillermo Del Toro? No one does creature-features quite like Del Toro, and this has been a dream project for the director for decades. With Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creation, the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September to good reviews and claims of faithfulness to the source material.
IT: Welcome to Derry
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be any more on-screen Stephen King this year, they just keep coming. With no direct source material, I suppose IT: Welcome to Derry is technically not an adaptation but a prequel to the 2017’s IT and its sequel, with director Andy Muschietti returning to direct, and Bill Skarsgård reprising his role as the demonic clown of Derry, Pennywise. The story acts as an origin story for Pennywise, set in 1962, 26 years before the events of the first film and the earlier section of the novel, and centres on a family that moves to Derry in the midst of a series of children going missing in the town. The trailer features various Stephen King Easter eggs, but one in particular has people speculating about a possible connection to The Shawshank Redemption.
The Running Man
In the last post I actually promised two more Stephen King adaptations before the end of the year, so here’s the other. Another one of his titles published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man has been (loosely) adapted before: the 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That adaptation switched the story to 2017, but the book originally placed it in 2025 – perfect timing for another crack. This time, Baby Driver director Edgar Wright is taking the helm, with the promise of a much more faithful journey from page to screen. The story takes place in a totalitarian dystopia of the United States, in which a desperate man (played by Glen Powell) enters a violent reality TV show in which he must survive 30 days of being hunted by a team of hitmen for a prize of one billion dollars.
The Housemaid
It seems fitting that we should have a Colleen Hoover and a Freida McFadden adaptation in the same post, considering the rise of the latter author has very much mirrored that of the former, both taking their respective genres by storm in a short amount of time, thanks in large part to BookTok. The Housemaid series is what really kicked off McFadden’s rise as a mystery powerhouse, and it’s getting a huge push for the big screen, with Paul Feig (A Simple Favour) behind the camera, and Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried starring. The story follows Millie, a troubled young woman just released from prison who unexpectedly gets hired as the housemaid for a wealthy young couple and their daughter, but she gets more than she bargained for when dark secrets within their mansion come to light.
Add a comment to: Read It Before You See It 2025: Mystery queens, double King, Springsteen and Frankenstein