Now that we’re all suddenly down a major touchstone of YA serialized literature—courtesy of the poor Twitter and/or life choices of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling—it’s clearly time for that other mainstay of Scholastic Book Fairs in the mid-2000s to come into its own: K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs books. Hence news from The Hollywood Reporter today, indicating that the 54-book series is finally getting the movie treatment, after years of rumors (and one TV show) to that effect.
For the unfamiliar—maybe you were an Eragon kid, we don’t know—the Animorphs books centered on a crew of mostly-normal kids who get granted the power to turn into animals in order to, uh, wage a bloody guerrilla war against aliens capable of taking over human brains. (It was kind of heavy!) Applegate (and her various ghostwriters) got a lot of credit for not glossing over how much it might suck to have to save humanity and cope with the complicated emotional life of being a vole, and the books remain fond memories for lots of kids growing up in the early 2000s. Now, Scholastic is teaming up with studio Picturestart—also responsible for the in-development Naruto and Borderlands movies, suggesting that it’s got at least a few key policy makers who spend way too much time on Tumblr or Reddit—to make a movie version of the series.
The film will presumably introduce audiences to Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Jake, and Tobias, and their not especially fun lives as child soldiers/hawk soldiers in opposition to the deadly Yeerk. Meanwhile, Scholastic has previously produced a number of films based on its books, including Goosebumps, The Golden Compass, and Captain Underpants.