Matthew McConaughey's acclaimed 1996 legal drama A Time to Kill is getting a sequel TV show, and here's everything we know about it so far. While McConaughey is a certified A-lister today, especially after the "McConaissance" of the 2010s, one of the first big roles to set him on that path was playing southern lawyer Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill. Based on a John Grisham novel, the film received positive reviews and was a box office smash, earning $152 million on a $40 million budget.
Interestingly, A Time to Kill was actually the first published novel for Grisham, the most famous author of legal dramas in the world. It wasn't the first to be adapted to film, that was The Firm, which became a hit in its own right with Tom Cruise in the lead role. Still, A Time to Kill is a movie many remember fondly from its 1990s heyday, especially thanks to McConaughey's performance as Jake, as well as Samuel L. Jackson's as Carl Lee Hailey, the defendant in the central murder case.
While Grisham wrote a sequel book starring Jake in 2013 - called Sycamore Row - it wasn't adapted. It looks like Hollywood won't make that mistake again, with HBO recently making plans to adapt Grisham's third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, into a TV show.
On March 18, 2021, it was reported that A Time for Mercy, John Grisham's book sequel to A Time to Kill, will be adapted by HBO into a limited series. A Time for Mercy is planned to comprise eight to ten episodes total. This kind of prestige novel adaptation is nothing new for HBO, who recently counts Stephen King's The Outsider and Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects among its book to limited series success stories.
So far, the only actor said to be involved with A Time for Mercy is Matthew McConaughey himself, reprising the role of Jake Brigance. In addition to the aforementioned Samuel L. Jackson, A Time to Kill also starred recognizable faces like Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Oliver Platt, and Donald and Kiefer Sutherland. However, there isn't necessarily reason to expect any of those actors to return, as A Time for Mercy chronicles an entirely different case. It would at least make sense for Judd to come back as Jake's wife Carla though.
In A Time for Mercy, circumstances don't get any easier for Jake Brigance than they were in A Time to Kill. Instead of defending a Black man accused of murdering his daughter's white rapists, Jake is tasked with trying to save the life of a 16-year-old boy accused of shooting and killing a police officer. As usual for such a case, local law enforcement is demanding the harshest sentence possible for a cop killer, but there's an added wrinkle to the story, in that the victim was also a domestic abuser who had almost beaten the boy's mother to death first. As he pursues the case, Jake finds himself and his family becoming a target.
Production for A Time for Mercy is still in the early stages, as HBO has yet to specify a timetable for when production will begin, much less a release date. According to initial reports about the show, HBO is presently meeting with potential writers, and also has yet to sign on a director. Sadly, A Time to Kill director Joel Schumacher passed away in 2020, as he would've been the obvious choice. All things considered, fans probably shouldn't expect a premiere date before 2022, at the earliest.
