Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Recycling intellectual property has long reigned supreme in Hollywood, but there’s an even more specific trend crystallizing: IP on TV. Films are being adapted and repurposed for the small screen at an unusually high rate lately; we’ve seen recent announcements for shows spun-off from Pacific Rim, Clueless, and Legally Blonde. (Blocking a James Bond TV show was a point of contention between Amazon and the franchise’s former producers, so you can bet that’s coming, too.) Here’s another one: according to Variety, Miramax is looking to adapt The Holdovers for TV now.
Obviously, it hasn’t been that long since The Holdovers was on the big screen. The film, about an anti-social boarding school teacher (Paul Giamatti) who bonds with a student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) over the holidays, premiered in 2023. It was eventually nominated for five Academy Awards, with Randolph taking home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Would the show be a reboot of the same story? A brand new tale set at Barton Academy? Would there be brand new characters, or will they try to lure back some of the old ones (Giamatti’s character was fired and Sessa is getting a little old for boarding school, but who knows)? Miramax CEO Jonathan Glickman offers Variety no info, except to say he “hopes that the film’s director Alexander Payne will be involved.”
The profile reveals there are some other film-to-TV adaptations in the works, including a Cop Land series from James Mangold and a Shall We Dance show with Jennifer Lopez as a producer. Other series in development with the studio include a long-gestating Gangs Of New York show, Chocolat, and The English Patient. The Shipping News, originally a Kevin Spacey-starrer and box-office bomb, is being considered for “a second life as a Canadian television series.” Overstuffing the film-to-TV pipeline would seem to undercut the value of cinematic IP (well, maybe not for The Shipping News), but then undercutting cinema in favor of people just watching stuff on their own couch does seem to be the direction of the business lately. That said, Variety reports Glickman seems “more excited about telling new stories” than rehashing the old ones; he wants “more than half” of Miramax’s planned five to eight films a year to be original material.
