SunnyMarch and Studiocanal have acquired the film rights to How to Stop Time. It’s also winner of the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Popular Fiction. It is a Sunday Times Bestseller and is a Richard and Judy Book Club Pick. It is published in the UK by Canongate and will be published on 6th February 2018 by Penguin in America. The studio is in active development on an adaptation of Haig’s 2020 novel The Midnight Library.How to Stop Time is my latest novel. StudioCanal, a producer on Tinker Tailor Solder Spy, also adapted Haig’s children’s novel A Boy Called Christmas for the 2021 feature film of the same name from director Gil Kenan. StudioCanal and Cumberbatch’s Sunnymarch will produce the series, which will shoot in London and Europe next year. How to Stop Time has been in development at StudioCanal for some time and was initially planned as a feature film. The whole team is incredible, and it is so great to feel a story is in the best possible hands.”

And Tomas Alfredson is the ideal director for this story. Haig added: “Benedict Cumberbatch is the dream person to play Tom Hazard and was always who I pictured in my mind. I am so thrilled to be reuniting with Tomas Alfredson, who is the perfect person to capture the scale, tension and sense of humor alive in DC Moore’s adaptation.”

“In his inimitable style, Matt once again explores what it is to be human and what it is to live a life - a very long one in this case - with pathos, insight, humor, drama and inspiration. “When I first read How to Stop Time, the potential of this story was immediately obvious,” said Cumberbatch. The first rule, and the one Tom threatens to break: never fall in love. To survive, those with anageria have formed a secret society to protect their own, but also to enforce strict rules of behavior. Their lives are one of perpetual loss, as they see family, friends, lovers and children die before them. Throughout history, Tom and men and women like him, have been feared, misunderstood and persecuted. The genre-bending novel, part love story, part spy thriller, follows Tom (Cumberbatch), a seemingly ordinary man who suffers from a very rare condition called anageria, which has kept him alive for centuries.

DC Moore (Sky and AMC’s upcoming Mary & George, starring Julianne Moore) is attached to write, adapting Haig’s novel for the screen. Tomas Alfredson, who directed Cumberbatch in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is attached to helm the six-part series. Benedict Cumberbatch is set to star in a TV adaptation of Matt Haig’s best-selling novel How to Stop Time, playing the lead role of Tom Hazard.

Matt haig how to stop time