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NEW DELHI: American streaming platform Netflix has announced a new thriller with director Hansal Mehta titled Scoop inspired by the book written by Jigna Vora, Behind The Bars In Byculla: My Days in Prison.
“Reading the book piqued my interest and compelled me to bring this story alive on screen. Great stories can only benefit from a service that can make it reach a wider set of audience, Scoop is that kind of a story and with Netflix, we will be able to take it to audiences across the globe," Mehta said in a statement.
To be sure, Mehta’s show is in keeping with the trend of streaming services turning to books for inspiration. His crime drama Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story that was based on The Scam had seen much traction on SonyLIV. Film production house Abundantia Entertainment has bought the rights of author Ashwin Sanghi’s historical science-fiction thriller Keepers of the Kalachakra to adapt into a multi-season web series.
Producer Sheetal Talwar had announced that he had bought the rights to Shashi Tharoor’s book Why I Am a Hindu. American streaming site Netflix has already adapted sports drama Selection Day, spy thriller The Bard of Blood, dystopian novel Leila and Salman Rushdie’s classic Midnight’s Children, after its success with Vikram Chandra’s crime thriller Sacred Games.
Earlier, a producer could easily plagiarise a western film and adapt it for local audience. But with the world having shrunk thanks to digital media, the next best option is to buy books and adapt them, media experts point out. For long, feature films have been churned out from popular books. Anurag Kashyap’s crime docudrama Black Friday and Arjun Kapoor and Alia Bhatt’s romantic drama 2 States stand out as examples.
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