Corona | Coming Attractions

Angelina Jolie will play the film version of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the heroine of 16 novels written by Patricia Cornwell since 1990. The deal could launch the start of a new movie franchise for Fox 2000, the studio where the property has found its home.

In a deal that took months to put all together, and only after Cornwell met Jolie and her manager to reassure the author that Angelina was the right person to bring the medical examiner to life. Mark Gordon (2012, 10000 BC, 12 Rounds) will produce the movie along with Geyer Kosinski, Jolie's manager. The idea now is to find a director and a screenwriter to begin shaping together the plot for what's hoped will be the first of many Scarpetta films.

And that's where we begin to see how the Kay Scarpetta movie franchise begins to differ from the novel one. Variety correctly compares Fox 2000's Scarpetta movie series to Universal's Bourne films which used Robert Ludlum's fictional spy as a leaping off point for the film trilogy's storyline and not a strict bible to be followed precisely. Perhaps the first Scarpetta movie will use elements from several Scarpetta books or maybe it will be a relatively straightforward adaptation of just a single novel. Right now it's all up in the air; the major hurdle was in getting an A-lister like Angelina Jolie to commit to the longterm possibility of starring in many thrillers playing the same character.