TJ Newman’s ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ Sparks Hollywood Bidding War

Hollywood’s hottest new action writer isn’t a guy, it’s TJ Newman, who’s taking center stage in a genre dominated by guys. And this is her first screenplay, an adaptation of her 2021 novel “Falling,” a domestic bestseller that sparked a bidding war among major studios and producers, including Jason Bateman, Matt Reeves, Neal Moritz and Jerry Bruckheimer, which Universal won.

Her second novel, Drowning , also released as part of a two-book deal with Avid, was another bestseller. When it was sent to producers in spring 2023, another bidding frenzy erupted among streamers and studios, this time between Nicole Kidman, Alfonso Cuarón, Damien Chazelle, the Russo brothers, M. Night Shyamalan, Steven Spielberg and others.

“The hardest thing for me to get used to was looking at the screen and seeing Damien Chazelle and Nicole Kidman and realizing they had just said my name,” Newman tells The Times. “It was just incredible to hear these artists who had inspired me throughout my career and who had shaped the art I wanted to make talking to me about something I had written and being interested in it and putting their own spin on how they told the story.”

Shane Salerno, Newman’s agent and founder of Story Factory, who led the negotiations, adds, “It’s really tough when you have four or five buyers who have all made movies that you love and admire, and they’re all gunning for it. I try to match great writers with great ideas. And that’s what works for us. We’ve been lucky to find people that other people have missed—Don Winslow, Adrian McKinty, Meg Gardiner. I think we’re really good at spotting talent. But I think it all comes from a really passionate love of books.”

Newman’s latest book, “Worst Case Scenario,” her first with her new publisher, Little Brown, is out Tuesday. It’s her first book not set on a plane, though it begins when a commercial pilot suffers a fatal heart attack. It’s not a spoiler to say that the plane crashes into a nuclear power plant in rural Minnesota. The rest of the story concerns the town’s efforts to prevent a full-blown nuclear disaster that threatens millions of lives.

“One of TJ’s gifts is that her characters not only feel like regular people, but they respond to a crisis and take action in a way that most regular people would. They don’t feel more extraordinary than the reader. As a result, the reader can more easily relate to them and feel their fear,” says screenwriter Steve Kloves, who is adapting “Drowning” for Paul Greengrass, who will direct it at Warner Bros. “There are no superheroes on a plane in ‘Drowning’ — just regular people who have to figure it out or die.”

Since 2019, Newman has signed multiple seven-figure deals, including a two-book deal with Avid Reader Press — a division of Simon & Schuster — another deal for the film rights to “Falling” and a two-book deal with Little Brown. Add to that a $3.3 million package deal for the film rights to “Drowning” along with a $1.5 million executive producer fee paid at signing.

“It was a whirlwind,” Newman sighs. “It’s been a few years now and I look back and think, ‘What happened?’ It still seems completely surreal and just unbelievable.”

It all started on a fateful day in 2019 when Salerno’s assistant called in sick, leaving him to go get the mail. Inside was a manila envelope containing the manuscript of “Falling” and a handwritten note.

“What caught my attention was how arrogant the letter was, the false bravado,” Salerno says. “It was the only unsolicited manuscript we ever took.” At the time, he didn’t know that 41 agents had submitted the material. “We put an ad in (Associated Press) about the book. It was a big deal. And then we went out and sold the movie. It was the perfect situation because we could surprise everyone and get it out there.”

After listening to numerous screenplays pitching “Falling,” Salerno and Newman decided to have the author write the script herself. “Not every novelist can transition into a screenwriter,” says Salerno, whose credits include “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Armageddon” and “Savages” as well as three upcoming “Avatar” sequels. “It’s like another language. She writes incredibly cinematically. She was such a huge fan of movies and understood them so well that I felt confident in myself, and they were confident that we could do it.”

Kloves, who is best known for writing all but one of the “Harry Potter” films, is leaning toward writing characters in films like “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” which he also directed, and “Wonder Boys,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. Inspired by Newman’s work, he hopes to bring similar depth and nuance to “Drowning,” his first disaster movie.

“I look for moments that come naturally, where I can flesh out each character’s story. TJ provided a series of shoes that drop, and every time they drop, they feel realistic, which isn’t always true in this genre. Sometimes it feels like things are happening in absurd ways,” Kloves says. “Somehow TJ found a way to make what’s happening seem inevitable. He keeps the tension going, but it doesn’t feel like it’s become absurd.”

When the “Falling” dealmaking began, Newman was a rookie waiting anxiously by the phone. But when the same thing happened with “Drowning” in the spring of 2023, she was in the conversation for a whole week of an ongoing bidding war between some of her Hollywood idols.

“You can tell if someone wants the book because it’s hot or if someone wants the book because they really love it and believe in it,” Salerno says. “With ‘Drowning,’ even though the offers were high, we didn’t take the highest. We took the second highest offer because we thought Warner Bros. (was) the most passionate. Literally, the executive who bought the book called in tears. The book has a very emotional ending.”

For Newman, just being in the presence of so many icons was overwhelming. “It left me scratching my head, wondering where life had taken me.”

A musical theater graduate from Illinois Wesleyan University, she moved from her hometown of Phoenix to New York to pursue a career on Broadway. Finding only disappointment, she returned home humbler but no less determined. There, she worked at a local bookstore, Changing Hands, and soon followed in her mother and sister’s footsteps by becoming a flight attendant for Virgin America on the Los Angeles-New York route.

The story of how she wrote “Falling” is already the stuff of legend — on a plane, on an iPad and occasionally scribbling notes on napkins, writing a book about a passenger jet that’s hijacked when the pilot’s family is taken hostage and he’s ordered to crash the plane.

“Her life is a really interesting series of events because if I hadn’t opened that envelope, things wouldn’t have happened the way they did,” Salerno says. “If a writer had come up with a great idea, TJ wouldn’t have stepped in to write the movie.”

After “Worst Case Scenario” was released, instead of auctioning off the film rights, she and Salerno took responsibility, packaging the book and shipping it to buyers at a later date. But money isn’t what motivates Newman, who has spent most of her life pursuing low-paying careers.

“I write books and make movies that people will read and watch and be moved and entertained by, that’s why I do it,” she says. “The money is amazing and crazy, but I still live in the same one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment I lived in when this all started.”