Rio2C Projects Showcase Opens Up to True Crime, Sports, Impact Content

Every Friday, The FADER's writers dive into the most exciting new projects released that week.

Michael Chernus (Severance, Dead Ringers) has been tapped for the title role in Peacock’s limited drama series Devil In Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Writer/directors Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who were behind the recent critically acclaimed FX limited series “A Murder At the End of the World,” have struck a deal with indie production shingle Sister to develop, write and produce original film and television projects. The deal, described as a “multi-year creative partnership,” reunites Marling and Batmanglij with Cindy Holland, the global CEO of Sister.

Glass Entertainment has managed to turn a number of its podcasts into TV documentaries including Betrayal for Hulu and Burden of Guilt on Paramount+.

In Hulu limited series Under the Bridge, adapted from the book by Rebecca Godfrey, Riley Keough plays journalist Godfrey, as she returns to her hometown to look into the real-life murder of a local girl, 14-year-old Reena Virk. Opposite Keough, Lily Gladstone stars as investigating police officer Cam Bentland, with whom Godfrey has a complicated history. Here, Keough explains how together, the actors explored Godfrey’s “radical empathy” around the murder, and how Keough and her producing partner Gina Gammell collaborated with creator Quinn Shephard and showrunner Samir Mehta to tell a complex and nuanced story.

Every Friday, The FADER's writers dive into the most exciting new projects released that week. Today, read our thoughts on skaiwater's #gigi, Zsela's Big For You, Martha Skye Murphy's Um, and more.

Warner Bros. announced on Thursday that Trap, the latest thriller from two-time Oscar nominee M. Night Shyamalan, will go earlier, moving up a week from August 9 to August 2nd.

EXCLUSIVE: On the heels of the season two finale of Apple’s critically acclaimed comedy series Loot, starring Maya Rudolph (who also exec produces), Apple TV+ has signed a multi-year, first-look deal with Banana Split Projects, the newly formed production company run by Maya Rudolph and Danielle Renfrew Behrens.  Under the deal, Apple TV+ will have a first-look on series and digital features developed and produced by Banana Split.

K.J. Yossman Despite its title, “How to Rob a Bank” is not an instructional video on how to commit crime. Instead, as its co-director Stephen Robert Morse tells Variety, it’s a documentary about “the consequences of crime.” The doc, which dropped on Netflix last week, focuses on a prolific ‘90s Seattle bank robber called Scott Scurlock, whom the FBI soon nicknamed Hollywood due to his penchant for elaborate disguises.

EXCLUSIVE: The UK’s nascent true crime producing body has urged broadcasters and indies to “recognise the additional burdens” placed on people making true crime in the wake of the tragic death of John Balson.

EXCLUSIVE: Ross Raphael is joining CAA Sports.

Trigger warning: this article includes mention of suicide and other topics that readers may find disturbing.

EXCLUSIVE: TV writers-producers Denise Thé, Melissa Scrivner Love, and Amanda Segel have formally launched Third Rail Productions with a first-look deal at Sony Pictures Television. Under the two-year pact, the trio will develop and produce scripted series for cable and streaming, focusing on dramas with female leads.

If anyone is going to profit from the Gypsy Rose Blanchard, it’s going to be her! That’s why she’s slammed a true crime influencer with a HEFTY lawsuit!

Marcelo Cajueiro RIO DE JANEIRO — Latin America’s largest creativity event, Rio2C, will gather over June 4-9 at the Cidade das Artes complex, in Rio de Janeiro, about 50,000 participants, up from 44,000 last year, including some 1,600 speakers and representatives of about 1,100 companies. Modelled after SXSW, the fifth in-person edition of Rio2C will feature over 500 panels designed to promote the convergence of film/TV, music, innovation, tech, games, publishing, science, fashion, sustainability and sports. Rio2C 2024, which has “The Age of Awareness” as the central theme, opens Tuesday, June 4 with five summits, followed by three days of conferences and the market.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent LB Entertainment, behind “Sintonía,” Netflix’s biggest Brazilian hit, has signed a first-look deal with Universo Online (UOL), the biggest news website in Brazil which had 99 million unique users in March 2024. In a groundbreaking swing for Brazil, but in line with the deal struck in 2022 by Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and The Washington Post, the Brazilian strategic partnership will expand UOL’s brand of storytelling to all forms of filmed entertainment. Owned by Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s No.

EXCLUSIVE: Non-fiction agency Indox, launched by former Dogwoof exec Luke Brawley, has boarded Visions du Reel competition title Mother Vera and will use the pic to launch a new boutique service focused on representing non-fiction and progressive media works in the UK and Ireland. 

Selome Hailu SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for “Mercy Alone,” the series finale of “Under the Bridge.” “Under the Bridge” doesn’t have “a traditional ending,” says showrunner Samir Mehta. After the penultimate episode of the true crime limited series saw Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton) sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the 1997 murder of Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta), in the finale, the white, wealthy Kelly Ellard (Izzy G) received only a five-year sentence despite having been the ringleader. “Justice wasn’t really served in real life, so it couldn’t ever be that type of story where you get to the finale and the bad people go away,” Mehta says.

Alison Herman TV Critic No one could top the sensational ending to “The Jinx” — not even “The Jinx.” In 2015, the HBO true crime docuseries profiling New York real estate heir and alleged serial murderer Robert Durst shocked the world by catching Durst on a hot microphone making an apparent confession. “Killed them all, of course” was hardly a smoking gun from a legal point of view, but as television, those five words were the kind of stunning revelation that decades-old cold cases rarely provide.

Every Friday, The FADER's writers dive into the most exciting new projects released that week. Today, read our thoughts on DIIV's Frog In Boiling Water, Young Jesus's The Fool, mui zyu's Nothing or Something to Die For, and more.