Tag Archives: Books to films

Adventure is a choice, and you must choose wisely…

Posted on by
Reply

[adrotate banner=”1″]Because not every ending is a happy one! Time to wig out and wonder how they’re gonna pull something off, because Choose Your Own Adventure is coming to the big screen. As in an actual film, not a multiple-choice DVD (which exists!) Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon continue their spree of writing half of the films coming out in Hollywood (assuming the deal closes), while Rawson Marshall Thurber is attached to direct.

There is no work on exactly how they are going to translate this to film. The choices are:

1- Make patrons walk from theater to theater based on their choices – “If you want to find the Ruby Skull, go to Theater #3. If you want to battle the Fire Gnomes, go to Theater #5”

2- Do a sort of Run, Lola, Run style film, where we see events play out multiple times based on different choices (which would result in multiple bad endings that we can just reset!) Make the main character a precog or something, but different than that Nic Cage movie.

3- Do a campfire round table similar to Rashomon, with characters telling the same events with different choices. (hat tip to @RacattackForce)

4- Invent some sort of device where the audience votes on what happens next, like was in Futurama and I think was an actual gimmick for a real movie (and the voting machines did nothing, IIRC. I can’t find any information on if I am remembering this correctly!)

5- Ignore the choice aspect entirely, become a generic film. The safest and lamest solution.

Besides the lack of information on how they will pull it off, there is no information on which of the many many books they will be using (if any), which offer a dream choice of almost any genre imaginable.

I do hope they at least have monsters show up, like this one I remember: The Abominable Snowman. Because we need more monsters in films! Whatever they choose for Choose Your Own Adventure, it better be the correct ending!

Choose Your Own Adventure Abominable Snowman

via THR

Captain Underpants plunges into the movies!

Posted on by
Reply

[adrotate banner=”1″]Aw, yes, Captain Underpants will be making his feature length debut in an animated fashion! For those of you who haven’t bothered to look around a bookstore lately, Captain Underpants is a series of children’s books featuring two kids who accidentally hypnotize their principal into thinking he’s the super hero known as Captain Underpants. Then all sorts of wacky things happen. Besides the ridiculous humor, the Captain Underpants books feature flip-o-rama, where you flip pages back and forth rapidly to simulate animation of various action scenes. The series is written by Dav Pilkey and is at 12 published entries, with more on the way (and that’s not including spinoffs!)

The animated motion picture version will be produced by DreamWorks, and the voice cast has just been announced. Ed Helms will voice evil principal Mr. Krupp as well as his unknown alter-ego, Captain Underpants. Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch will play George Beard and Herold Hutchins, the two students who hypnotize Principal Krupp. Jordan Peele voices Melvin the nerd, and Nick Kroll will play the villain, Professor Poopypants. A name I hope he keeps high on his resume!

You might be interested to know that the Captain Underpants books are among the most challenged in school libraries. Not only to parents object to the toilet humor (there are actual villainous toilets!), but they complain the books teach kids to disrespect authority. But if your authority is so bad that a children’s book threatens it, maybe your authority sucks in the first place! Captain Underpants and Freedom of Speech for Life!

My one hope is this movie succeeds, and thus we get a movie for The Day My Butt Went Psycho.

via TheWrap

Captain Underpants Talking Toilets

YA books to films update!

Posted on by
Reply

Daughter of smoke and bone
[adrotate banner=”1″]Time for more greenlighted YA books with gimmicks! “Why?”, you might ask? It’s because these are generally very very cheap, come witht heir own entrenched fanbase, and there is always the potential Twilight/Hunger Games mega-million$. So expect more and more YA films to get greenlit even if you don’t like them! One of these entries won’t even get published for well over a year! So far no casts are attached.

The book: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (a trilogy, 3rd book due in 2014)
The gimmick: A 17 year old woman dates an angel, and there is a war against demons
Why it might be good: Laini Taylor has hot pink hair in every photo I’ve found of her. The setting of Prague means they can use a cheap European crew to keep costs down.
Why it might suck: It sounds like City of Bones, and we all know how well that did! Laini Taylor has hot pink hair in every photo I’ve found of her. Director Michael Gracey is a visual effects man with no completed directorial films yet. They probably won’t use “How Do You Talk to an Angel” by The Heights on the soundtrack.
via

The book: The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (will not even be published until 2015!)
The gimmick: in a dystopian future, people are divided up based on the color of their blood. A 17 year old woman becomes a revolutionary leader
Why it might be good: Breaking Bad writer Gennifer Hutchison will be adapting it. It’s been called Graceling meets The Selection.
Why it might suck: This sounds like The Hunger Games except with a racism allegory for babies. Also the book won’t be published for two years, which makes it sound like it was picked up because the author knows someone, not because the book is any good. No one outside of the YA world knows what the hell I am talking about when I say “Graceling meets The Selection”
via

Never fear, there will surely be more and more YA books…in the FUTURE!

Artemis Fowl is the next "Next Harry Potter" book to film series you haven't read yet

Posted on by
Reply

Artemis Fowl Goggles

I’m Harry Potter with goggles and fashion sense, suckers!


[adrotate banner=”1″]Though from the look of these books, I could read them all in a week. But I’m too busy playing a game. Of thrones. At the moment to read them, but I’ll have plenty of time before the first entry hits theaters. At this moment, all we know about Artemis Fowl the film is that it’s happening.

Plenty of YA books have come and gone from the theaters without making even the slightest of ripples. No star and no director means I can’t call it the new failure, but at the rate studios have been churning out YA fiction books into film to try to find the next Harry Potter (and the next Twilight), eventually something will end up making bank. Sure, Percy Jackson inched by to somehow score a sequel, but Eragon, The Golden Compass, and Alex Rider are among the dead.

Artemis Fowl is an antihero who does both bad and good things, this status can serve to give the series a different flavor from some of the other fantasy fair. Or they’ll just screw it up. Have any of you read the series? If so, do you think Hollywood can turn it into a good film, or will they be using Artemis Fowl as a tax writeoff?

Also because I’m a jerk, I hope that “foul language” is one of the MPAA warnings about Artemis Fowl.

Is YA novel film Beautiful Creatures the new Twilight?

Posted on by
Reply

[adrotate banner=”1″]Beautiful Creatures certainly wants to be Twilight and Harry Potter and True Blood combined.

Let’s see,

  • We got a girl who moves to a new city and meets a boy
  • We got the rural South (South Carolina instead of Louisiana)
  • We got magical powers and spells and crap
  • We got goofy characters and high profile actors playing these supporting roles.
  • We got based on a popular Young Adult book series
  • We got dumb terms like Parselmouth (example: Palimpsest – One who reads time)
  • We got…THIS:
Beautiful Creatures Twilight

Oh, Edwar– I mean, Ethan!

No, I do believe this is a totally original property!

For those of you who need convincing of the originality, here is some more information:

The small town of Gatlin, South Carolina will never bee the same when newcomer Lena Duchannes arrives to live with her recluse uncle and enrolls in the local high school. There, she catches the eye of local guy Ethan Wate, who is having reoccurring dreams of a girl who smells like lemon. Oddly enough, Lena Duchannes smells like lemon. When life gives you lemons, you gotta lemonade that girl, but before that can happen they have to get through all this stuff about Lena being a Caster (aka someone who can do magic) and at age 16 will undergo the Claiming, which will make her choose light or dark. This family takes their Thanksgiving turkey dividing seriously! Also there are a bunch of weirdo magic relatives of hers and a bunch of small town anti-witch people. And probably some smooching. No word on if a shirtless character that transforms into an animal falls in love with a baby, but this is only the first book in the Caster Chronicles series. Don’t get your hopes too far up!

Featured players in Beautiful Creatures include Alice Englert as Lena Duchannes, Alden Ehrenreich as Ethan Wate, Jeremy Irons as Uncle Macon Ravenwood, Viola Davis as Amma, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Lincoln and Sarafine, Thomas Mann as Link, and Emmy Rossum as Ridley Duchaness. Richard LaGravenese directs. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl wrote the original novels. Expect February 13th to be a day that lives in infamy.

Oliver Twist goes all Parkour with the help of Red Bull!

Posted on by
3

[adrotate banner=”1″]When you think Red Bull Energy Drink, you think 19th century poor English orphans, and that’s the kind of word association that Red Bull is banking on making them bank at that box office. Thus, they’re funding a new Oliver Twist film, and riding the lightning from the Taylor Lautner parkour bike messenger film Tracers, this new Oliver Twist will feature 3D Parkour! The way Dickens intended. Twist will feature the Fagin gang going all parkour on naive 19th century townsfolk, striping their pocketbook and their sense of innocence. Just waiting for Artful Dodger to crack open a can of Red Bull Energy Shot after stealing the crown jewels in bullet time. Will there be dubstep? You can pretty much guarantee it!

Why stop with Oliver Twist? I want parkour everything! Parkour is the new asteroids hitting the Earth. Parkour Star Trek, Parkour Iron Man, Parkour Fast and the Furious, Parkour Parks and Recreations. Parkour it all!

via FSR

cat parkour

Even this cat is doing parkour. Or running to get a laser pointer. Same thing!