Falling: T.J. Newman writing adaptation of her survival thriller novel for Universal

Last Updated on April 29, 2024

T.J. Newman was working as a flight attendant on the Virgin Airlines redeye flight from Los Angeles to New York when she had the idea for a novel she ended up calling Falling. She couldn’t get a lot of people interested in her story at first. She was rejected by more than forty different agents. But then Shane Salerno and The Story Factory signed her, and her luck turned around in a major way. She landed a seven-figure deal with Avid Reader / Simon & Schuster, another seven figures for deals in thirty other countries… and then the film rights went to Universal Pictures and Working Title for $1.5 million. They were the winners of a bidding war that included more than a dozen bids. Now Deadline reports that Newman has been hired to write the screenplay adaptation of Falling herself.

Falling (pick up a copy HERE) has the following description: You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

I haven’t read the book yet myself, but that definitely sounds like a set-up for a gripping thriller. Author Don Winslow found Falling to be so intense, he even referred to it as “Jaws at 35,000 feet” for a cover blurb.

While Newman works on getting Falling to the screen, her second novel is about ready to be shopped around. That one is called Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 – and, as you can tell from the title, it’s another airplane-based survival thriller. It will probably become a movie, too. That one tells the following story: A plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean six minutes after takeoff and is flooded after an explosion during evacuation. A dozen survivors sink in a sealed part of the aircraft as it perches precariously on an undersea cliff 200 feet below the surface. Among them is an engineer and his 11-year-old daughter. His estranged wife and the girl’s mother is part of the elite rescue team that races to save the passengers before their air runs out.

Do Falling and/or Drowning sound interesting to you? Have you read Falling, and if so, do you think it would make a good movie? Share your thoughts on the works of T.J. Newman by leaving a comment below.