Screen Talk: Angelina spies a Salt sequel

Plans for a sequel to 2010's Salt, the Angelina Jolie spy movie that also starred Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, are back on the table.

Columbia Pictures has hired Becky Johnston to work on the script. In 2011, Columbia hired the movie's credited writer, Kurt Wimmer, to write a sequel but Jolie didn't commit to it.

Devlin makes a deadly debut

Development exec-turned-screenwriter Lindsay Devlin has been given the job to adapt Reboot, an upcoming young-adult novel written by Amy Tintera, for the big screen. The novel, due to be published by HarperTeen in May in the US, is set after the world becomes infected with a deadly virus.

An addiction to the big screen

Novelist Zane a forty-something Maryland mother who has sold more than eight million books, is on a Hollywood hotlist of novelists. Her best-known US hit, Addicted, about a woman who seeks sex-addiction counselling, is at Lionsgate with Bille Woodruff (Beauty Shop) directing.

Ransom going for a Burton

Ransom Riggs's novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is attracting heavyweight Hollywood interest. The US bestseller follows a young boy as he searches for the truth about his grandfather on an island populated by children with special powers. Tim Burton is attached to direct.

A fertile source of horror

Breed, a horror novel by Chase Novak, aka Scott Spencer, the author of Endless Love, will be directed by Burr Steers. Known for directing Zac Efron in Charlie St Cloud and 17 Again, Steers is adapting the book, about a couple who undergo fertility treatment that turns them into bloodthirsty savages.

Tortured souls get worried

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt and killing of Osama bin Laden, is attracting political heat. Republicans were up in arms before it was shot for it being supportive of President Obama. But now it is Hollywood's liberals who are worried about the stark depiction of torture.