In re-launching the Morning Deal Report, we promised you all the latest news on comic book and videogame adaptations, but here’s one we didn’t see coming: According to the Hollywood Reporter, J.J. Abrams will soon be bringing a New York Times feature to the big screen. The article, entitled “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” concerns “an Upper East Side luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that the occupants had redesigned to include hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games for their four preteen kids.” The $8.5 million residence houses “an elaborately clever ‘scavenger hunt’ built into the apartment that involved dozens of historical figures, a fictional book and a soundtrack.” It’s nice to have more money than you know what to do with, or so I’m told.
Variety reports that Spike Lee will take a break from feuding with Clint Eastwood long enough to direct The Time Traveler, adapted from “a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation's first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.” The book contains “the technical specs for what Mallett envisions as a workable time machine. Developing a time machine became an obsession for Mallett from the age of 10 after his father's death. His goal was to travel back in time to save his father.” Spike Lee’s goal is travel back in time to prevent himself from making She Hate Me.
Finally, those who are still experiencing Sopranos withdrawal a year later can take a break from those elaborate last episode theories with Son of Mourning, a “satirical indie comedy” that will co-star Lorraine “Dr. Melfi” Bracco and Jamie-Lynn “Meadow” Sigler. Per the Hollywood Reporter, “Bracco and Sigler will play the mother and love interest, respectively, of a disaffected ad copywriter (Joseph Cross). When he returns home to deal with his parents' divorce, the locals mistake him for a spiritual savior who will deliver them from the world's climate crisis.”
