The Choose Your Own Adventure books were a sensation in the days when video games were still limited by their graphic presentation, an empire spanning over 180 books and selling millions to eager pre-teens and teens thrilled to be taking an interactive approach to literature. And because everything must be a movie these days, Choose Your Own Adventure is being revived for the big screen.
THR reports that Rawson Marshall Thurber is in line to direct the untitled Choose Your Own Adventure adaptation, and Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are in line to write. Garant and Lennon are aces at this sort of family-friendly material, having penned the Night At The Museum series as well as stuff like Herbie: Fully Loaded, movies where adults fall face forward into stuff for the benefit of kid audiences. Thurber is hot right now, having directed surprise hit We’re The Millers to a $269 million worldwide gross. There’s no decimal point missing from that number.
So, what’s this gonna be like? No details have been released as to how they plan on adapting a multi-part book anthology series that stretches across every genre you can imagine. Here are a few guesses:
-Like the planned Ouija movie that thankfully crashed and burned, it could be about someone partaking in the brand name of which the film is based. In Ouija, summoning the board was the first step in launching the characters into a vast adventure. Here, you could have the children falling into adventures where they can momentarily stop in order to select between two choices. In fact, it can feature Ben Stiller (who worked with Thurber on Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) as a man who grew up reading the books, and who picks one up to feel like a kid again, only to actually end up a part of the story.
-Maybe they limit it to an adaptation of one specific story. Perhaps Ben Stiller plays a child who discovers The Cave Of Time and embarks upon a journey that sees him interact with a number of historical figures. As if he were spending the night somewhere. Like a museum or something.
-We’re The Millers was a bawdy R-rated comedy, Lennon and Garant’s recent directorial effort was the hard-R Hell Baby, and the audience for the Choose Your Own Adventure books is unquestionably in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Why not do a hard-R rated version where a guy who read the books as a kid finds out that he suddenly has the ability to boil every choice he makes down to one of two choices. And then he uses that power to have sex with everyone. Ben Stiller stars.
-Perhaps it can be a metaphor of sorts. A boy is coming of age in the early nineties while voraciously reading each and every Choose Your Own Adventure book he can find. Soon, he realizes that maybe life isn’t a series of questions with only two possible outcomes, and his illiterate father (Stiller) helps him see things in a new light. The final ten minutes could be the child exploring alternate timelines that he might one day experience, fantasy sequences that would give Stiller a great chance to play dress-up.
-Thurber joins twenty six horror directors as they all film major Choose Your Own Adventures crossroads, where Ben Stiller chooses poorly and dies a horrible death, via trap doors, snakes, helicopter crashes, or dinosaur attacks.
How do you think the Choose Your Own Adventure books should be adapted?
