If you spent even a microsecond in the 1980s as a kid, you probably at least once read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. They were dirt-cheap, could keep kids who forgot to bookmark each fork entertained for hours, and highly popular until video games forcibly replaced them. Now, for some reason, they’re getting a movie.
And this isn’t a cheap rush job that’ll be dumped in theaters in August against a superhero movie, either. It’s got some pretty major talent behind it, according to the Hollywood Reporter:
Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, the writers of Fox’s Night at the Museum franchise, are in final negotiations to write the script for the studio’s adaptation of iconic 1980s book line Choose Your Own Adventure. Additionally, We’re the Millers director Rawson Marshall Thurber has closed a deal to helm the adaptation.
Unfortunately, this is a “family adventure” movie, so you’re not going to see the Reno 911! team cut loose with the kind of obscene, tasteless material we all actually wanted out of those books. But we guess families need movies to watch too.
For us, the big question is not going to be how they stay faithful to the material because the very concept is patently ridiculous. They’re going to have a kid with a magical book or something ridiculous like that, we guarantee it. No, a better question is how much they can get away with. This thing is probably going to have a nine figure budget, and these books crossed dozens of genres, so there’s actually some potential here to go completely insane. What we’re saying is, if these guys don’t have a dinosaur-riding cowboy solving a mystery in space, they’re not doing their damn jobs.
Either that or they shoot a dozen different movies and put them all out at once, Clue-style. Hey, with digital technology, it’s possible.
(Image courtesy of Nathan Penlington on Flickr, who actually has a rather interesting documentary about these books)