EXCLUSIVE: Crystal City Entertainment and Moonshot Films have partnered to acquire the rights for Lisa Jewell’s bestselling novel Then She Was Gone for a feature film adaptation.
Jewell’s books, which have sold some 10 million copies worldwide, are hot properties in the adaptation market at the moment. Over the summer, Deadline revealed that Netflix is working on an adaptation of the UK writer’s 2023 book None of This Is True.
Her 2017 thriller Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel Mack and the aftermath of her youngest daughter’s unexplained disappearance.
Ten years on, a still grieving Laurel meets a seemingly perfect man, but his nine-year-old daughter’s resemblance to her own lost child soon becomes an obsession, leaving her no choice but to dig deeper into the past…whatever she might find.
Crystal City Entertainment’s Jonathan Rubenstein and Ari Pinchot and Moonshot Films’ Louis Paltnoi and Andrew Baker are producing the project.
Actress and writer Catherine Steadman, who is repped by Casarotto Ramsey & Associates, has joined the project as screenwriter.
Former Downton Abbey actress Steadman, whose more recent acting credits include The Rook and On The Edge, is also a bestselling author of psychological thrillers in her own right, with works including 2018 book Something In The Water.
She made her screenwriting debut with The Ex-Wife for Paramount+, a psychological thriller starring Celine Buckens and Tom Mison.
With the Then She Was Gone feature adaptation in the early stages, casting has yet to get underway.
Published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Penguin Random House in the UK, Then She Was Gone has to date sold over three million copies, with 2.5 million copies sold in the U.S.
It was on the New York Times Best Selling List for 90 weeks, holding the top slot for nearly two months), was a Sunday Times Bestseller and has over 112,000 reviews on Amazon of at least 4.5 stars.
Jewell books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and have been published in over 25 languages. She recently published Breaking the Dark: A Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel, the first book in a new Marvel Crime adult fiction series. Jewell is repped by Curtis Brown and UTA.
Crystal City’s Rubenstein and Pinchot recently took producer credits on Irving Franco’s Adam The First, starring David Duchovny and Oakes Fegley, while Moonshot’s Andrew Baker was a producer on family animation The Amazing Maurice, with Louis Paltnoi taking an executive producer credit.
