Dayna Jung Photography

EXCLUSIVE: QC Entertainment, the manufacturing firm behind latest Best Picture Oscar contenders BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, has snapped up rights to J.D. Barker’s forthcoming erotic thriller novel Behind a Closed Door in a preemptive bid, with plans to adapt it for movie. 

The acquisition follows QC’s work with Barker on The Fourth Monkey, a present to adapt his award-winning, bestselling novel sequence of the identical identify. QC will, as in that case, produce alongside Spin a Black Yarn, which reps the author.   

Billed as 50 Shades of Grey meets David Fincher’s The Game, Behind a Closed Door introduces readers to Sugar & Spice, the newest app craze taking the world by storm, which leads downloaders Abby and Brendan Hollander right into a harmful recreation of life and loss of life. When the app assigns the pair a sequence of more and more taboo duties, they quickly discover themselves caught up in a twisted net of seduction and violence.

Sean McKittrick and Raymond Mansfield will produce the movie adaptation for QC Entertainment, with Ryan Lewis and Josh Malerman for Spin a Black Yarn. QC’s Edward H. Hamm Jr. will exec produce alongside Barker. The corporations will subsequent take the e-book to filmmakers and solid earlier than approaching studios with the bundle later this 12 months.    

A New York Times and worldwide bestselling creator of quite a few novels, together with Dracul and the Fourth Monkey sequence, Barker’s books have been translated into two dozen languages and bought in additional than 150 international locations, whereas being optioned for each movie and tv, as beforehand talked about. His newest with James Patterson, Death of the Black Widow, was launched April nineteenth.

Led by companions McKittrick, Mansfield and Hamm, QC Entertainment is finest recognized for producing the crucial and business successes Get Out and BlacKkKlansman — from filmmakers Jordan Peele and Spike Lee, respectively — having been concerned in each facet of each initiatives, from improvement to manufacturing and launch. The movies, scoring back-to-back Best Picture Oscar nominations for QC, additionally every claimed screenplay prizes. McKittrick additionally produced Peele’s sophomore effort Us, which notched $70.3M home in its opening weekend alone, reaching the most important opening ever for an unique horror movie. QC’s newest function, It Lives Inside — a horror-thriller from filmmaker Bishal Dutta — gained the Midnighters Audience Award at SXSW 2023 and might be launched by Neon later this 12 months.  

Lewis and Josh Malerman shaped Spin a Black Yarn after the success of Netflix’s 2018 Sandra Bullock starrer Bird Box, primarily based on the New York Times bestseller by Malerman. The post-apocalyptic horror thriller, on which Lewis served as an EP, for a time held a document because the streamer’s most-watched title inside 28 days of launch. Lewis and Malerman have since produced the psychological horror movie We Need to Do Something, which was launched by IFC Films after bowing at Tribeca, and are exec producers on a brand new Netflix-bound Bird Box film set in Barcelona, which is at present in post-production.

Barker is represented by Lewis of Spin a Black Yarn and Alec Shane of Writers House; QC Entertainment by Chris Abramson of Felker Toczek Suddleson.