If you are of a certain age, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series likely played a part in your childhood. The books have a clever conceit, presenting a variety of already wild genre and adventure tales, in which the readers (usually 10 to 14 year olds) decided for themselves the path the narrative takes. Every few pages readers are presented with a few choices of where to take the protagonist next, with a page number to jump to depending on which option you decided on. It’s pretty fun stuff if you’re a kid, with books taking you forward and back, and eventually to an ending…sometimes a happy one or an unfortunate one, but it was never dull. The best ones had you reading again to see where the different options took the story. Somehow… this is becoming a tentpole.
Back in 2011, Red Crown Productions. snapped up the rights, and now 20th Century Fox is swooping in hoping to create what THR calls “a crossplatform four-quadrant action-adventure franchise.” Bleh. Of course, the entire concept of the books is that it’s the reader who drives where the story goes and bringing it to the hard-wired, non-risk taking format for the blockbuster world seems a bit counter-intuitive. Unless this is going to be “Sliding Doors” of $100 million dollar movies.
The other option is that Fox is just going to adapt the books directly and just choose what story they want to follow. We’d wager this is the direction they’ll probably go, but since this whole series is founded on the idea of interactivity from the person engaging in the story, this entire thing just sort of misses the point completely. But then again, this is Hollywood, so no surprises there.