Thursday Murder Club nominates Chris Columbus, stars for membership

Chris Columbus has just signed up to solve a murder and he might be bringing some heavy hitters to help him out. It was just revealed that the director has signed on to adapt Richard Osman's 2020 novel The Thursday Murder Club for Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.

The senior story follows the adventures of a quartet of residents at the fancy pants retirement community of Cooper's Chase. Elizabeth Best, Ron Ritchie, Joyce Meadowcroft and Ibrahim Arif usually chat about mysterious killings that have yet to be solved, but when one happens in their backyard, they join forces to solve it themselves. According to Variety, the book caused such a stir in Hollywood that 14 studios got in on the action of trying to acquire the rights.

Columbus has helmed some of the most beloved films of all time including Adventures In Babysitting and Home Alone on up through the first two Harry Potter films. His most recent release was the holiday family flick The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two. While he has certainly covered a lot of ground in his film career, this will mark Columbus' first outing in the septuagenarian murder mystery genre.

The director's involvement will certainly inspire a great deal of curiosity from moviegoers, but the potential cast should skyrocket interest. Variety adds that Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Pierce Brosnan are in talks to join the club.

Osman took to Twitter/X to tease the cast, which he seems very excited about. He wrote, "Just been on a call with Amblin, and the cast for #TheThursdayMurderClub movie is insanely great, I think people are going to love it. Official announcements very soon, and can't wait to share it with everyone."

Mirren is one of the most celebrated dramatic actors around for good reason, but she also seems to choose fun films to act in. She recently narrated Barbie, co-starred in Shazam! Fury Of The Gods and joined the Fast & Furious family as the matriarch of the Shaw family. In RED and RED 2 she notably joined forces with several other distinguished actors for an actioner romp.

Kingsley is primarily a dramatic actor who we've also seen be quite funny in Marvel Studios movies like Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. And of course, Brosnan followed up his stint as James Bond with a variety of roles in everything from A24 horror (False Positive) to musicals (Mama Mia) and super hero flicks (Black Adam) to action thrillers (The Foreigner, The Misfits).

Whoever winds up joining in on the investigation could potentially have a franchise on their hands. Osman followed up Thursday Murder Club with several sequels including The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed and The Last Devil To Die. Osman's reportedly working on a fifth installment that is set to come out next year, maybe to coincide with the release of the film. We'll see!