Francis Lawrence Directing Neil Gaiman 'Neverwhere' Adaptation For TV

The Hunger Games has been good to director Francis Lawrence. His career was set in a new, more firm direction by the success of the second film in the franchise, and he's soon to see the release of his third Hunger Games movie, and the final movie in the film series.

That leaves him with options, and among the other projects Lawrence has cooking (which include a film version of The Odyssey, and the movie Red Sparrow), he's now set to exec produce and direct two TV series. One is based on Neil Gaiman's '90s novel Neverwhere, and the other adapts the novel House of Thieves.

Deadline reports that the Mark Gordon Company, which is also behind Grey's Anatomy and Criminal Minds, is backing the development of both projects.

Here's the recap of Neverwhere, originally released in the mid-'90s and previously adapted to TV by the BBC. That series was good, though not great, with a turn from a much younger Peter Capaldi. At nearly 20 years old, that BBC series shows its age now (check out footage here) and so I'll be curious to see how Lawrence tackles it.

Richard Mayhew is a plain man with a good heart — and an ordinary life that is changed forever on a day he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. From that moment forward he is propelled into a world he never dreamed existed — a dark subculture flourish in abandoned subway stations and sewer tunnels below the city — a world far stranger and more dangerous than the only one he has ever known...Richard Mayhew is a young businessman with a good heart and a dull job. When he stops one day to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk, his life is forever altered, for he finds himself propelled into an alternate reality that exists in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations below the city. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

And then there's House of Thieves, based on the novel by Charles Belfoure. Here's an account of that novel.

In 1886 New York, a respectable architect shouldn't have any connection to the notorious gang of thieves and killers that rules the underbelly of the city. But when John Cross's son racks up an unfathomable gambling debt to Kent's Gents, Cross must pay it back himself. All he has to do is use his inside knowledge of high society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives won't solve. The take better include some cash too ?the bigger the payout, the faster this will be over. With a newfound talent for sniffing out vulnerable and lucrative targets, Cross becomes invaluable to the gang. But Cross's entire life has become a balancing act, and it will only take one mistake for it all to come crashing down ?and for his family to go down too.