Amazon continues its attempt to expand its streaming library with established literary IP. The company’s hugely expensive Lord Of The Rings series remains in the works, and now the streaming platform has secured the rights to Stieg Larsson‘s Lisbeth Salander books, and Michael Connelly‘s The Lincoln Lawyer series.
While Amazon have secured the rights to Larsson’s feminist hero, the show will not use the author’s Millennium books. Instead, the resourceful hacker will feature in all new stories and situations.
Will they be anywhere near as good as the original Noomi Rapace series and David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Probably not, however hopefully Amazon secures a female showrunner and multiple female writers for this one. After all, the original Swedish title for the first book was Men Who Hate Women.
As for The Lincoln Lawyer, according to the author himself, CBS had been days away from starting production on its own Lincoln Lawyer series starring Logan Marshall-Green, when the town it was supposed to shoot shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. “And then, a month later, [CBS] decided not to go forward with it”, said Connelly.
CBS’ loss is Amazon’s gain. Reportedly, CBS was apprehensive about proceeding with the legal drama, even though it hailed from Emmy winner David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies), because the show would’ve been serialised rather than episodic, different from the network’s standard crime procedurals.
Viewers would have had to watch each episode to make sense of the story rather than be able to drop in and out of the show as they pleased, something CBS wasn’t into. Amazon, with the ability to release all episodes at once, aren’t going to have a problem with that.
The Lincoln Lawyer was previously adapted into a 2011 film starring Matthew McConaughey. Both these adaptations fit Amazon pretty well considering they already have multiple book adaptations like Bosch and Jack Ryan.
They also have shows revolving around Lee Child‘s Jack Reacher series and James Patterson‘s detective Alex Cross in the works.
Bestselling book series have pretty reliable fan bases, and with such competitive bidding from streaming platforms and networks for IP nowadays, securing the rights to multiple well known characters is a good move by Amazon. We’ll see if book adaptations become Amazon’s streaming niche as the streaming wars really heat up with this week’s launch of HBO Max.
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