TV
Stephen King’s ‘Billy Summers’ TV Series in the Works from Producer J.J. Abrams
Not long after we learned that Stephen King’s Later is getting a limited series from Blumhouse, Deadline reports that Stephen King‘s Billy Summers is also getting a limited series.
Scribner released Billy Summers in August 2021, and Deadline reports that J.J. Abrams‘s company Bad Robot is behind the planned limited series adaptation of the novel. Bad Robot previously entered the world of Stephen King with “Castle Rock,” “Lisey’s Story,” and “11.22.63.”
Deadline adds, “Ed Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz will adapt, with Zwick directing.”
The project is being shopped to networks and streamers. Stay tuned.
“Billy Summers is a hitman who is looking to retire, and takes one last highly lucrative job to feather his nest. The job requires him to embed himself in a quiet town, where he pretends to be an aspiring writer (he actually pours himself into the prose). He sets up in an office with a direct view of where hitman Joel Allen will be delivered to face trial for shooting two men during a poker game. Allen has also committed enough murders for some high level mobsters to be scared the gunman will incriminate his former employers to lessen his sentence. Summers, a meticulous craftsman, becomes more and more cynical about the mobsters who’ve hired him, and his skepticism is well warranted as things go awry following completion of the job.”
Michael Roffman wrote in his review for BD, “When Stephen King is not running and gunning with bullets and brawn, he’s delectably building out his world — even when he’s exploring familiar locales. (Hint, hint, Constant Readers.) Again, it’s all muscle memory to him, which is why Billy Summers reads like a sum of all his strengths. Who we meet, where we go, and how we get there is all vintage King through and through. Sure, some of it’s cheesy, some of it even on-the-nose, but none of it ever comes across like a cover for him.”
Stay tuned to The Losers’ Club, our weekly Stephen King podcast, who will cover this story and many other related King headlines on this week’s episode due out Friday. If you couldn’t tell, it’s a busy time in Hollywood for King these days.
There’s a lot going on in the world of Alien at the moment. The original classic is returning to theaters, for starters, and the Xenomorphs will be fighting Marvel’s superheroes in the upcoming mashup comic Aliens vs. Avengers. Of course, the main event for 2024 is Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, a brand new big screen movie set between Alien and Aliens!
With so much going on, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Disney is also working on an “Alien” television series, in the works for FX from creator Noah Hawley (“Legion”).
The Alien franchise’s first ever television series is likely to arrive sometime in 2025, set to be the first story in the franchise that takes place on Earth, roughly 70 years in the future.
FX teases, “Expect a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth.”
So what’s the latest on the “Alien” TV series? Deadline reports today that filming is underway in Thailand, and Sandra Yi Sencindiver (“Foundation”) is the latest actor to sign on.
According to Deadline’s report this morning, the series is set 30 years before the events of the original Alien – Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, meanwhile, takes place 20 years *after* the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien – dealing with “the emergence of the story’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the race between corporations to create new android life.”
Deadline adds in today’s casting report, “We understand that Sencindiver appears in multiple eps and will play a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.”
Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry Darling), Babou Ceesay (“Guerrilla”), Jonathan Ajayi (“Wonder Woman 1984”), Erana James (“Uproar”), Lily Newmark (“Sex Education”), Diêm Camille (“Washington Black”), Adrian Edmondson (“War & Peace”), Timothy Olyphant (“Fargo”), David Rysdahl (“Fargo”), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World), Samuel Blenkin (“Black Mirror”), Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), and Moe Bar-El (The Peripheral) star in the upcoming sci-fi/horror series.
Sydney Chandler is playing a character named Wendy in the series, said to be “a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.”
Sandra Yi Sencindiver in “Foundation”
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