Deadline is reporting that Sophia Lillis, the young star of last year’s blockbuster IT, has been tapped by Warner Bros. to headline their potential franchise starter Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase. Based on the second of 175 books in the “Nancy Drew” series published since 1930, Lillis will portray the tireless title sleuth as she investigates a potentially haunted house and a missing landowner.
Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Kleeman, and Chip Diggins will produce Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, with Wendy Williams executive producing. No director or screenwriter has been announced yet, but the project is expected to begin filming shortly.
The character of Nancy Drew was created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer to go along with his Hardy Boys book series. The books were written by a series of ghostwriters and published under the pen name Carolyn Keene. The character first appeared in 1930 and evolved over the years with the culture. Depending on the version of the story, Nancy Drew is either 16- or 18-years old and is an amateur detective. She is often helped by her best friends, cousins Bess Marvin and George Fayne, both of whom are women. It can be assumed that the friends of the author in the series are the people upon whom she bases Bess and George.
The book Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase was previously adapted as a Warner Bros. movie in 1939 starring Bonita Granville as Nancy Drew, itself the fourth of four Drew mystery movies. The studio attempted a modern-day reboot titled Nancy Drew and starring Emma Roberts in 2007, which failed at the box office. NBC announced last October that they were developing Nancy Drew series inspired by the books from Doubt creators Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, producer Dan Jinks and CBS TV Studios. The original 2015 concept would have focused on an adult Drew working as a detective for the NYPD, and a pilot was shot starring Sarah Shahi (Person of Interest) as the titular character, but was later scrapped. Previous TV adaptations included The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries which ran from 1977 to 1979 on ABC, a 1995 series titled Nancy Drew featuring a 21-year-old Nancy, and a 2002 ABC TV movie titled Nancy Drew intended as a pilot for a series that was never greenlit.
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