‘Project Hail Mary’ Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller Are Bringing a Classic Whodunnit to the Big Screen

The pair will produce a "Murder, She Wrote" movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by Jason Moore, set for theaters Christmas 2027.

This is a real fun one. With the success of “Project Hail Mary,” two of the newest hottest directors in Hollywood, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, are lending their names to another beloved franchise, and certainly not one you’d expect.

Lord and Miller will produce a film version of “Murder, She Wrote,” the iconic whodunnit Angela Lansbury-starring series, and they’ve tapped Jamie Lee Curtis to step into the shoes of amateur detective Jessica Fletcher.

Amy Pascal and Aditya Sood are also producing the film, and it is being released by Universal Pictures as part of Lord Miller’s first-look deal with the studio. Universal has even already set a release date of December 22, 2027, right around the holidays, for its theatrical release.

Jason Moore (“Pitch Perfect” series) is directing the new “Murder, She Wrote,” and he’s working from a screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (“Dumb Money”) as based on the television series created by Peter S. Fischer and Richard Levinson & William Link.

Lord and Miller have had a phenomenal track record taking unsuspecting properties and making them into modern day comedy hits. Their “21 Jump Street” and its sequel “22 Jump Street” are fantastic examples of adaptations of an otherwise serious ’80s show that was made into something funny, silly, and wildly successful.

They, of course, also built a franchise out of “The Lego Movie” and its subsequent sequels and spinoffs, and the enormous success of “Project Hail Mary” has caught a lot of folks off guard. It will be fascinating to see what they can do with “Murder, She Wrote,” particularly in a world very much into the “Knives Out” franchise and its ilk.

Curtis has been excited about bringing this movie to the screen for a while. She teased back on the “Freakier Friday” red carpet that it was happening, and now it finally has a release date. Development on the adaptation goes back several years. At the moment, its proposed release date falls just days after a new “Star Wars” movie, a new “Lord of the Rings” movie, and also “Avengers: Secret Wars,” and it opens on the same day as the Sony animated movie “Buds,” so we’ll see which of these days get shuffled.

“Murder, She Wrote” ran for 12 seasons between 1984 and 1996 and had, at one point, an average as many as 40 million viewers per week. It was followed by some TV movies and even a video game adaptation, but it’s been several decades since there’s been a proper reboot.