EXCLUSIVE: Great news for fans of E. Lockhart’s popular YA books: Julie Plec’s My So-Called Company and Universal Television has acquired the rights to We Were Liars, Family of Liars and Again Again.
We Were Liars is a tragic love story and an amnesia thriller set on a privately owned island off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s been on the NY Times bestseller list for the past 22 months.
The recently released Family of Liars, the prequel to We Were Liars, takes readers back to the story of another summer, another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.
Julie Plec Courtesy of Warner Bros. Again Again follows Adelaide Buchwald who, after a near-fatal family catastrophe and an unexpected romantic upheaval, finds herself catapulted into a summer of wild possibility, during which she will fall in and out of love a thousand times while confronting the secrets she keeps, her ideas about love, and the weird grandiosity of the human mind.
Carina Adly MacKenzie (Roswell New Mexico, The Originals) and Lockhart are set to co-write the adaptation of Again Again while Plec will adapt We Were Liars and Family of Liars. Mackenzie will showrun and executive produce Again Again with Plec attached as executive producer alongside Plec’s partner at MSCC, Emily Cummins.
Carina Mackenzie Farrah Aviva “I’ve chased We Were Liars for years,” Plec said. “It’s one of the best YA novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot. It’s mysterious, romantic and devastating — and Family of Liars showed me just how sprawling and multi-generational the series can be. Being able to adapt it for television is a career highlight for me — not to mention how thrilled I am to bring the lovely, intimate, emotional journey that is Again Again to life with Carina and the Emilys (Lockhart and Cummins).”
“One day in early 2020, Julie Plec and I drank white wine and ate taco chips together in a Mexican restaurant,” said Lockhart. “Though I had met her before, and though I adored The Originals and Legacies and Roswell, New Mexico, when we had drinks she was so wonderfully, amazingly astute about storytelling, she understood the themes in my books so well, and she was such an incredible powerhouse of business acumen and nutball levels of intelligence, I knew I would be insanely lucky to have her take charge of as many of my novels as she wanted. As for Carina Adly MacKenzie, she is a story queen and a brainiac who is very funny and mind-blowingly thoughtful. I can’t wait to go on this adventure with her.”
Plec is currently under an overall deal at Universal Television, where she is developing projects across all platforms for the studio, including those she is writing and creating, and those for which she is supervising writers under her banner. She is co-creator and co-showrunner of the upcoming series Vampire Academy, based on the popular book series, which recently wrapped production in Spain and debuts Sept. 15 on Peacock. She is also the co-creator and co-showrunner of the new series Dead Day, along with longtime collaborator Kevin Williamson, which was recently picked up to series at Peacock, as well. Plec also EPs Girls on the Bus, which was picked up straight to series at HBO Max.
Other novels by Lockhart include Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero, Again Again, Genuine Fraud, Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and the Ruby Oliver quartet: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends. We Were Liars won the Goodreads Choice Award and was Amazon’s No. 1 YA novel of 2014. Lockhart is represented by Kassie Evashevski at Anonymous, Elizabeth Kaplan, and Jonathan Ehrlich.
MacKenzie is represented by WME, Entertainment 360 and Felker Toczek Suddleson Abramson.
