Netflix, Mark Wahlberg And Peter Berg Revive Robert B. Parker’s Spenser With Wonderland

Detective Friction

♦ Netflix has just announced that they will be planning a new series of feature films based on the late Robert Parker’s creation Spenser. Here’s the details from Deadline…

Netflix has made a deal with Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg and the Robert B. Parker estate to bring back for a potential series of feature films Spenser, the poetry-spouting, wisecracking boxer-turned-Boston-based private eye made famous in 40 novels by Parker, and in three seasons of the ‘80s TV series that starred Robert Urich.

The first film will be an adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, one of the eight Spenser mystery novels written by Ace Atkins, who took over the series after Parker died in 2010. The movie will differ from the novel, in that it begins with Spenser emerging from a prison stretch, stripped of his private investigator license. Here, he gets pulled back into the underbelly of the Boston crime world when he uncovers the truth about a sensational murder and the twisted conspiracy behind it.

Neal Moritz will produce through his Original Film banner, along with Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Berg, the latter through his Film 44 banner. Script has been written by Sean O’Keefe. Toby Ascher will be exec producer alongside Film 44’s John Logan Pierson.

Wahlberg and Berg are frequent collaborators who memorably covered Boston in Patriots Day, the drama about the investigation and manhunt for terrorists who detonated explosives at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. They’ve also teamed on Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, the upcoming STX release Mile 22, and potentially The Six Billion Dollar Man at Warner Bros.

Raised in Dorchester, Wahlberg has made an emphasis of participating in Boston-based films that have also included The Perfect Storm, The Departed, The Fighter, Ted and its sequel. While promoting Patriots Day and noting that his output in Boston-centric films was eclipsing that of favourite sons Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Wahlberg told Deadline “There are so many great stories to be told here. There are so many great characters. They’ve done a great job, those guys. I think I’ve made more movies about Boston than them, but we can all co-exist. They can have Cambridge and everything on that side of the bridge. And everything this way, towards the hood, that is mine. I’ve been to their neck of the woods. I’m not sure they’ve spent that much time in mine.”

Now, he’ll get another chance to use the colors of that city (unless they cheap out and shoot in Canada) in reviving the Spenser mystery series, with enough past books to provide a blueprint for a reasonably priced series of movies that could add a new dimension to the streaming service. Another tough guy Parker series revolving around the brooding police chief Jesse Stone, has become a periodic CBS telepic with Blue Bloods star Tom Selleck playing the cop.

Deadline Spenser Netflix News