thepublishingtimes.comEditorial

The Publishing Times

All the News That’s Fit to Publish

industry · Guides

What the Lionsgate Correspondent Stories Do Not Include

Deadline and Variety reported on March 18, 2026, that Lionsgate won a seven-studio bidding war for Virginia Evans's novel, with Jane Fonda attached. Neither story has a release date or a price.

The Publishing Times Staff · May 14, 2026 · 6 min read

What the Lionsgate Correspondent Stories Do Not Include

Jane Fonda has a film credit that does not yet have a calendar. On the morning of March 18, 2026, two trade papers reported that Lionsgate had taken a feature adaptation of Virginia Evans's novel The Correspondent. Deadline's headline said the studio won a seven-studio bidding war and that Fonda would star. Variety's headline said the same star and the same studio. Neither headline is a release date. Reading them as if they were one is how a rights story gets inflated into a slate.

The package, as both papers describe it

Matt Grobar's Deadline story and Angelique Jackson's Variety story line up on the people attached that day.

Fonda stars, and she also produces. Todd Lieberman produces with her, through his company Hidden Pictures. Cat Vasko is adapting the novel and executive producing. Evans, the author, executive produces beside Vasko. For the studio, Chelsea Kujawa and Pavan Kalidindi oversee the project. Erin Westerman, president of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, is quoted in both stories. The sentence both papers carry from her is that the studio was honored that Evans, Fonda, and Vasko had chosen Lionsgate as the partner. In that same remark she points to an earlier book-to-screen from Lieberman and his colleague Carly Elter, The Housemaid, as the work she is measuring this team against. She does not attach a number to that earlier film in the portion of the remark both papers print the same way, and this account does not supply one.

Both stories name the people watching the production for Hidden Pictures: Carly Kleinbart Elter and Aydan Cohen. Both also name Dan Freedman as the person who negotiated for the studio. Those are job titles in a rights story. They are not a shooting schedule.

Deadline describes the book as the number-one New York Times bestseller. That is Deadline's description of the novel's sales rank. It is not a statement of what Lionsgate paid.

A bidding war of seven studios means six other companies bid and lost, or dropped out. The stories used here do not name those six. Inventing the list would be a guess. So would inventing the price. Grobar and Jackson do not print one.

Credits that are not a shoot

An attachment is a name on a deal memo. It is not a call sheet. On March 18, these reports did not name a director. They did not name a city, a start date, or a distributor's release window. Production List, updated March 26, 2026, lists Janus Metz as director and Toronto as the location, and it marks the shoot date TBA. That listing is not the announcement. Deadline and Variety, on the day of the sale, named neither a director nor a city. This account stays with the trade reports and does not treat the later listing as a confirmed start.

The Wrap, reporting the same sale, says Fonda will play Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer who has long used letters to impose order on a complicated world. That is jacket copy in a trade piece. It is not a screenplay. None of the three reports prints scenes from a script, and this piece will not invent them.

"Set up at Lionsgate" and "lands at Lionsgate" are rights headlines. They say the studio is the one that will try to make the movie. They do not say the movie has been shot, scored, or dated. Anyone using the story as proof that a 2026 adaptation opened is ahead of the reporting.

The same limit applies to the author's credit. Evans is named as an executive producer, next to the screenwriter. That is a credit in a trade piece. It is not a fee schedule. The archived AALA canon that took effect on April 29, 2022, still posted as the archived canon, forbids a member from taking producer fees without the client's prior written informed consent, and it forbids packaging fees on television and film deals completed after that date. AALA now points to a 2026 revision for the current canon, and the public highlights of that revision do not restate the producer-fee sentence. The March stories do not say whether anyone was paid a producer fee at all. A credit and a fee are different facts, and only the credit is in the record.

The contract is a different document

Nothing in either trade story describes Evans's publishing contract or her agency agreement. Do not read the Lionsgate sale as evidence of her split, her commission, or whether a publisher still held the dramatic rights. Those questions belong to the book contract, and they are walked through in Who Actually Controls a Book's Film Rights. This report stops at what Grobar and Jackson printed.

What you still cannot take from the trade story

After both articles, a reader knows the buyer, the star, the producers, the screenwriter, the author's executive-producer credit, the studio executives named as overseeing, and that Westerman spoke for the motion picture group. A reader does not know:

  • the price
  • the names of the other six studios
  • whether a director is hired
  • whether a start date exists
  • whether Fonda's producing role pays a fee, and to whom
  • which company, author or publisher, had the right to sell the book in the first place

Those gaps are the story. A house-by-house ranking of "which Big Five titles get filmed" cannot be built from one March morning, and it cannot be built by inventing a funnel the houses have not published. One documented sale, read closely, is worth more than a fake slate.

If a later piece of reporting adds a director or a date, that is a new fact and it needs its own citation. Until then, The Correspondent at Lionsgate is a rights deal with a star attached, announced March 18, 2026, and still without a release date in the stories that announced it.

Sources