‘The Staircase’: Colin Firth Is Michael Peterson in HBO Max True Crime Limited Series (Video)

Clayton Davis Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official awards predictions for the upcoming Oscars and Emmys ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis; Awards Circuit Column, a weekly analysis dissecting the trends and contenders by television editor Michael Schneider (for Emmys) and Davis (for Oscars); Awards Circuit Podcast, a weekly interview series with talent and an expert roundtable discussion; and Awards Circuit Video analyzes various categories and contenders by Variety's leading awards pundits. Variety's unmatched coverage gives its readership unbeatable exposure in print and online, as well as provide inside reports on all the contenders in this year's awards season races.

To Bridget, who cannot cook! Bridget Jones’s Diary was a huge hit when it debuted in April 2001 — and its stars have only kept rising.

EXCLUSIVE: The headline-grabbing true story of the 1981 killing of Elana Steinberg at the hands of her husband in Scottsdale, AZ, and the sensational murder trial that followed, is getting the small screen treatment. Murder of a Jewish American Princess, based on Shirley Frondorf’s nonfiction book, Death of a Jewish American Princess: The True Story of a Victim on Trial, is being developed into a true-crime limited series. Murder of a Jewish American Princess hails from journalist/author Cari Lynn, who penned the pilot, and Tom Mazza’s Everywhere Studios, which plans to shop the project to prospective buyers shortly.

Guy Lodge Film CriticOperation Mincemeat was an aptly absurd code name for what was, on the face of it, a preposterous British military mission: In 1943, with Allied forces planning to invade Sicily and wrest it from fascist Axis control, two intelligence officers conspired to convince the Nazis they were targeting Greece instead, pulling off the ruse with false documents and the stolen, dressed-up corpse of a fictitious British marine. It’s a true chapter of history that nonetheless sounds like a war film as dreamed up by Ealing Studios scriptwriters; it’s practically begging to be made into a farce, and sure enough, the gag-filled knockabout musical “Operation Mincemeat” hits London stages this very month.

Charlize Theron is getting into the “superhero business,” but we should clarify, an atypical one that doesn’t seem all that connected to the superheroes you know. At least not yet.

Where’s Mr. Darcy? While Duchess Camilla visited Jane Austen’s England residence to learn more about the beloved author’s literary collections, there was a certain Darcy-sized presence missing.

It was July 1943 when MI5 started “the greatest deception in history.”

Hoping to change the course of World War II and save tens of thousands of lives, two intelligence officers plot to break Hitler’s deadly grip on Europe by recruiting the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. That’s the story of “Operation Mincemeat,” a meat and potatoes looking WWII thriller from Netflix and director John Madden (“Shakespeare In Love”) Due in select theaters on Friday, May 6, and premiering on Netflix Wednesday, May 11, the film does feature a solid cast that includes Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, and Johnny Flynn.

HBO Max executive vice president and general manager Andy Forssell is leaving WarnerMedia ahead of the close of the company’s merger with Discovery, which is now set to close as early as Friday, Variety has learned.News that Forssell is out the door comes just as sources confirmed WarnerMedia studios and networks group chairman and CEO Ann Sarnoff was informed on Tuesday by leadership that her position would be eliminated, and follows WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar’s resignation this morning.As Variety reported earlier Tuesday, though insiders previously said the transaction between Discovery and WarnerMedia’s current owner AT&T would be formally completed on April 11, leading to the creation of new company Warner Bros. Discovery, two sources with knowledge of the situation say the merger is now expected to potentially be finalized by the close of business Friday.

After his stint as Marvel‘s “Iron Man,” Robert Downey Jr. has been moving into the role of producer.

HBO Max original series picks up 15 years later, with the beloved original cast spending two months in Rivera Maya in Mexico.  Three generations of Garcias sit in a beautiful room, while the family matriarch makes an announcement.

HBO Max is slowly turning into the home for projects directly connected to the cinematic side of WarnerMedia. The streaming service hosts multiple feature films set in the DCEU and even two shows directly set in the world of Matt Reeves‘ “The Batman.” Now, HBO Max is setting its sights on a recent billion-dollar horror film property.

Colin Firth gets interrogated in the brand new trailer for HBO Max’s The Staircase.

There is something suspicious about Colin Firth in HBO Max’s “The Staircase”.

A “must-see” is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit nowadays, with streaming services throwing out major TV series and films all the time. But with HBO’s “The Staircase,” the term couldn’t be more appropriate.

Wilson Chapman editor“The Staircase,” a new true-crime drama miniseries starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, will premiere on May 5, HBO Max has announced.The series is based on the true story of Kathleen Peterson, who in 2001 was reported dead by her husband Michael after having fallen down the stairs of their home. Michael was soon charged with her murder, leading to a court case that drew headlines and revealed secrets about the couple’s relationship. The story received renewed interest in 2018, when Netflix released the documentary miniseries “The Staircase,” which covered the case from 2001 to 2017.In HBO Max’s series, Firth portrays Michael, while Collette plays Kathleen.

The true-crime phenomenon—documentaries, movies, documentaries, series, and everything in between—has obviously hit an absolute zenith in recent years. This inexorable truth would explain why HBO Max would bother rehashing the mysterious circumstances of the death of Kathleen Peterson with their new scripted series “The Staircase” from showrunners Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohen (“American Crime Story”)—there’s still so much meat on the bone.

not to happen. Will they manage to work things out? That’s question posed by the trailer for the upcoming Paramount+ miniseries “The Offer,” which you can watch now.Of course, by now you know the movie in question was “The Godfather” and that this show is based on things that actually happened, so of course they managed to work it out.

The phrase, “Well behaved women rarely make history,” attributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard professor Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, gets bandied about a lot these days in conversations about women who push the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior. But that particular brand of feminism, in which women are allowed to be anti-heroes in search of their ambition, rarely seems to rear its head in the slew of recent documentaries and series about women who made history in the mid-20th century.