EXCLUSIVE: Apple Original Films has locked down rights to Once and Again, a forthcoming romance novel from New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle, for adaptation in film.
The project is in early development, with Liz Tigelaar — the multi-hyphenate behind prominent literary adaptations like Tiny Beautiful Things and Little Fires Everywhere — set to adapt.
The project will be produced by Lee Eisenberg and Natalie Sandy for Piece of Work Entertainment (Lessons in Chemistry, WeCrashed) under their overall deal with Apple. Serle will also produce, along with David Stone for TFC.
Marking Serle’s fourth novel with Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Once and Again publishes March 10.
Billed as The Time Traveler’s Wife meets The Lakehouse, the story follows Lauren Novak, a Malibu native who left the beach behind for a picture-perfect marriage and life in Los Angeles. But as the relationship begins to crack and her husband gets a job in New York for the summer, Lauren finds herself back in the coastal town that shaped her, where she must contend not only with her parents and grandmother, but their most closely guarded secret: the women of the Novak family were born with a gift: Each of them can, just once, turn back time.
What she least expects is that her first love, fellow surfer and actual boy-next-door Stone, who broke her heart more than a decade earlier, is also back. Suddenly it seems as though every grain of sand on Malibu’s shores contains a memory or a secret. As she reconnects with her past, Lauren and Stone fall into familiar patterns, and Lauren must navigate a treacherous terrain of choice. Can she resist the temptation to rewrite her history with Stone? Is there such a thing as one right moment to alter time? And can anything ever truly be undone?
Weirdly, Tigelaar worked on an ABC series called Once and Again — under the mentorship of writing idol Winnie Holzman — near the beginning of her career. But the two projects are unrelated.
A foremost name in commercial fiction with millions of copies sold in over 30 territories globally, Serle is a hot commodity in Hollywood, as she’s previously set up film adaptations of her New York Times bestselling novels In Five Years, One Italian Summer, and Expiration Dates. In Five Years is set at New Line with Working Title producing; One Italian Summer at Paramount with Temple Hill producing; and her most recent bestseller, Expiration Dates, is set up at Amazon with Emma Roberts attached to star.
Serle broke out with The Dinner List, a critically acclaimed romance novel published in 2018. Previously, she adapted her YA series Famous in Love into a series for Freeform, seeing 21 Laps adapt her YA novel When You Were Mine into the film Rosaline for 20th/Hulu. She is represented by WME, TFC’s Stone, and Jeff Hynick at Jackoway Austen.
An Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated creator, showrunner and executive producer, Tigelaar is perhaps best known for creating, showrunning and exec producing two Emmy-nominated limited series for Hulu: Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed, and Little Fires Everywhere, based on the book by Celeste Ng. Recently, she also exec produced the hit FX/Hulu series Under the Bridge, starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough.
Recently signing an overall deal with both Paramount TV Studios and CBS Studios under her banner Best Day Ever Productions, which marks the first-ever joint deal between the two studios, Tigelaar’s film work includes adaptations of the bestselling Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, as well as The Cactus by Sarah Haywood for Netflix. She is repped by UTA and Wendy Kirk at Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.
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