EXCLUSIVE: In a competitive situation, Alloy Entertainment has secured the rights to How Ted Bundy’s Killing Spree Launched a Legion of Feminist Karate Masters, a story about The Feminist Karate Union, by Ivana Rihter, which was published on the Narratively media platform in October 2020. Alloy Entertainment president and CEO Leslie Morgenstein and EVP of Television Gina Girolamo will shepherd the development of the IP into a TV series.
The article follows the creation of The Feminist Karate Union. Founded in Seattle in 1971, the group took off in what they called “the Bundy Bump,” after Ted Bundy’s killing spree in the area. Women urgently looking to find a safe space to learn self-defense techniques flocked to the dojo, kindling a revolution in the previously male-dominated karate space. In the decades that followed, the organization would develop into a diverse, intergenerational community of women who all found strength, solace, and sisterhood in practicing karate.
Rihter is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor who covers pop culture, entertainment, and art, writing for such outlets as Vogue, Allure, Vice, Nylon, i-D and Bustle, among others. She is repped by Matt Sadeghian at Avalon and attorney Will Jacobson.
Warner Bros. TV-owned Alloy Entertainment is known for the successful TV adaptation of YA book series, including Gossip Girl, whose reboot recently finished its freshman season on HBO Max and was renewed for a second season. Alloy also has the hit Netflix series You, starring Penn Badgley, which recently released its third season and was renewed for a fourth. Morgenstein and Girolamo are currently in production on a reboot of another of Alloy’s popular series, Pretty Little Liars, titled Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, from Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and are developing with WBTV the Alloy book The Probability of Miracles, from author Wendy Wunder, as a limited series for HBO Max. On the feature side, the company is producing Purple Hearts, starring Sofia Carson and Nicholas Galitzine, for Netflix, its fifth feature film in the last four years, and has just attached Unjoo Moon to direct the feature adaptation of bestseller Frankly in Love for Paramount Players.