See How They Run has now arrived on Disney+ and the terrific murder-mystery has a meta edge as its cast of suspects are all connected with The Mousetrap.
The iconic Agatha Christie play is still running to this day in the West End, but the movie takes things way back to 1953 where it's celebrating its 100th performance when somebody is found murdered backstage.
In the spirit of the play, we won't reveal just who did it and why. However, the mystery ends up weaving in some elements about The Mousetrap that you might not realise are actually true.
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Because even though See How They Run is an entirely fictional tale that's inspired by The Mousetrap, it does reveal things about the classic murder-mystery that are based in real-life history.
Mild spoilers ahead if you're avoiding everything about the new movie.
Watch See How They Run on Disney+
The victim of this particular murder-mystery is Adrien Brody's director Leo Köpernick who has been hired by producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) to direct a movie version of The Mousetrap.
Like we mentioned, we're not going to go into the whys of the murder or even hint at who did it, but the investigation into it reveals a lot of double-dealing behind the scenes of The Mousetrap.
Woolf reveals that rights owner Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson) inserted a clause into the contract that states Woolf can't make a movie until The Mousetrap has closed down. It feels like a fact created for the movie, but this is genuinely true.
In 1956, Woolf bought the movie rights to The Mousetrap and, like we see in See How They Run, agreed to the unusual clause that no adaptation can be made until the West End production of The Mousetrap has been closed for at least six months.
While The Mousetrap was disrupted (as every other theatre show was) by the pandemic, it ran continuously from 1952 to 2020, before resuming its run in May 2021. It's the longest-running West End show by some distance with more than 28,700 performances to date.
Nostradamus himself couldn't have foreseen that The Mousetrap would end up running as long as it did. It meant that even though United Artists planned to make a movie of the play in 1959, it never transpired.
See How They Run is probably as close as we'll get to a 'faithful' adaptation of The Mousetrap. It's unclear if the pandemic disruption has led to that particular clause becoming invalid, but there doesn't seem to a movie version of the play on the horizon.
Like in the movie, Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim (played by Harris Dickinson and Pearl Chanda, respectively) were part of the original cast of The Mousetrap.
In real life, Attenborough made the incredible decision to take a 10% profit-participation for the production instead of a one-off fee for the play.
"It proved to be the wisest business decision I've ever made... but foolishly I sold some of my share to open a short-lived Mayfair restaurant called The Little Elephant and later still, disposed of the remainder in order to keep Gandhi afloat," he said in his memoir Entirely Up to You, Darling.
See How They Run is available to watch now on Disney+.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
