Riding on the momentum of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, now preparing for its Season 3 debut this December, Disney+ has announced another book-to-TV adaptation. Animorphs, the popular book series by Katherine Applegate and her husband, Michael Grant, is getting its own show, with fresh Oscar winner Ryan Coogler tapped to executive produce via his Proximity Media banner.
As Variety reports, the project is currently in early development and will follow “a group of teenagers who uncover a hidden threat lurking beneath their everyday lives, all while juggling relationships, curfews, and the chaos of High School.” The Summer I Turned Pretty scribe Bayan Wolcott is attached to write and executive produce for 20th Century, with Scholastic, the publisher of the novels, also on board as an executive producer.
No other details were shared, and it’s unclear which of the total 54 books will be adapted for the small screen. Debuting in 1996 with “The Invasion”, the series centres on teens Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias as they discover that a parasitic alien species is taking over Earth called the Yeerks. Each title chronicled the first-person perspective of one of the main characters and has collectively sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.
The upcoming Animorphs series isn’t the first of its kind — previously, Nickelodeon aired a two-season live-action series that ran from 1998 to 2000, starring X–Men actor Shawn Ashmore, Brooke Nevin, Boris Cabrera, Nadia Nascimento, and Christopher Ralph as the main quintet.
As for Coogler, the Sinners director will first direct his attention to a reboot of The X-Files. The revival project, led by Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel, was greenlit by Hulu earlier in February, featuring a logline that reads, “Two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.”
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
Kevin Low
