Where’s Waldo? It’s looking like at some point we may be finding him on the big screen as MGM has acquired the feature film rights to the popular book series.
Where’s Waldo? is a popular book series by Martin Handford, first published in 1987, which features illustrations of large settings full of people. The purpose of the book is to find Waldo, a man with a red and white striped shirt and hat, among the crowd. Part of the appeal of the books wasn’t just trying to find Waldo, but also looking at the other funning things that were going on in the picture. The amount of thought and humor put into each scene made the books fun to look at beyond the puzzle appeal.
Coming Soon posted MGM’s release, which states that MGM has secured the movie rights for Where’s Waldo to be adapted into a “live-action family adventure.”
On a related note, according to Variety the movie rights were Where’s Waldo? were picked up by Universal and Illumination Entertainment back in 2009, however it doesn’t look like there was any update on that project since then. Now it appears MGM is looking to move forward with it.
How exactly MGM plans to adapt the books to a movie isn’t clear, as the release mainly focuses on the success of the books over the last couple of decades. It’s likely some story will be developed around the character once the project gets a screenwriter (as opposed to a feature-length film where we try to find Waldo whilst staring at a lot of whacky scenarios). In the meantime, any thoughts on who should play Waldo?
