If you’ve ever watched Before Sunrise and thought to yourself, “This could benefit from being slightly shallower,” you‘re in luck. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a duo of writer-producers from NBC’s About A Boy have been hired to adapt Gayle Forman’s YA novels Just One Day and Just One Year into a single feature film adaptation.
From the author of If I Stay, which was also recently adapted into a crappy feature film, the two novels together detail the story of a young couple who “meet and share one incredible day (and night) together only to be separated, spending the next year looking for each other and finding themselves while on that journey.” Interestingly, the producers don’t seem to be incorporating the 55-page eBook conclusion of the series, Just One Night, into the film, suggesting that there may be an eBook out there that’s not worth your time.
The film is being produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage’s Fake Empire, a company well-versed in excruciatingly self-aware teenagers from Schwartz’s time creating The O.C. and Gossip Girl. The writers, Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, also recently completed the script for YA adaptation The Future Of Us, but since that has not yet been released, we can’t report on the quality of the translation from book to film. Given that Just One Day has been described by The New York Times as containing phrases that “wouldn’t be out of place in a third-rate romance novel,” a new life as a movie might be the best thing that could’ve happened to the book.