EXCLUSIVE: Blumhouse Television has landed the rights to turn Stephen King’s bestselling novel Later into a limited series star vehicle for Lucy Liu. Series creator Raelle Tucker wrote the pilot script.
Published in March 2021 by Hard Case Crime, Later centers on Tia, a literary agency owner who is raising her son Jamie alone and finds herself on the brink of professional ruin when her star author client dies before turning out the work that will make her agency financially whole. Jamie has the supernatural ability to talk to the dead, all of whom tell him the truth. This is very helpful when he talks to the dead author and feeds the contents of the book to his mother, who writes it herself and publishes it under the author’s name, to great success. But this gift can be used for more nefarious purposes. Tia’s police detective girlfriend figures out what the boy can do, and soon the youth gets over his head in the spirit world, as Danny Torrance did in King’s The Shining.
Tucker was Emmy nominated for her work on HBO’s True Blood, and she collaborated with Blumhouse Television on the anthology series Sacred Lies and Sacred Lies: The Singing Bones, which starred Juliette Lewis and Jordan Alexander for Facebook Watch.
Liu, who starred for seven seasons on the CBS series Elementary, most recently starred in Death to 2021 for Netflix and next stars in the Warner Bros DC sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods. She also appeared recently on Curb Your Enthusiasm and starred in the dark comedic series Why Women Kill.
“I’ve wanted to work with Jason Blum for years, and now we have two projects together,” King said. “Go, me!”
Blumhouse separately is producing an adaptation for Netflix of Mr Harrigan’s Phone, one of the stories in King’s anthology novel If It Bleeds. Production just finished, with John Lee Hancock directing Donald Sutherland and Jaeden Martell.
The Blumhouse founder/CEO responded: “I’ve wanted to work with Stephen King since before I was born, which sounds impossible until you remember that it’s Stephen King.”
Said Tucker: “Later is terrifying and touching and wonderfully weird — of course it is, it’s Stephen King. Adapting one of my favorite writers of all time, with an incredible partner like Blumhouse and the incomparable Lucy Liu, is a dream come true.”
Blum, Chris McCumber and Jeremy Gold are executive producers for Blumhouse Television.
Tucker is represented by UTA and Mckuin, Frankel and Whitehead. Liu is with ICM Partners, Framework Entertainment, and Schreck Rose Dapello.
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