Choose Your Own Adventure Books Will Become Choose Your Own Movies

I think, though I am not positive, that Hollywood is very slowly attempting to adapt the collective childhood of my generation to the big screen. Next on the dock? The Choose Your Own Adventure books, that popular series of the 1980s and 90s, will be transformed into a film series.

For all you young ‘uns who did not experience the weirdness of Choose Your Adventure, allow me to elucidate. The series featured adventure tales – from westerns to sci-fi to fantasy to crime – in which every couple of pages the reader had to determine what to do next by turning to selected pages.  ‘Do you: go into the dungeon (turn to page 15) or follow the path (turn to page 23)?’ That kind of thing.  The adventure changed depending on your choices, though of course there were those cheaters who would flip around trying to determine the best course of action that didn’t result in horrible death. Not that I ever did that.

So now the Choose Your Own Adventures will become Choose Your Own Movie. 20^th Century Fox is hoping to make a mint on it, creating a film franchise that presumably will take different directions depending on the film. Or something.

Of course, part of the fun of Choose Your Own Adventure was that the reader drove the plot to a certain degree – something that is just not possible in a film franchise. Although, I can see how several different versions of the same story could be interesting in a film. But that’s already been done a couple of times.

There’s no word as yet about how Fox plans to handle this series. The Choose Your Own Adventure books weren’t exactly classic works of literature in and of themselves, so just making straight forward films of the stories would kind of miss the point. But I’m certain they’ll be able to find a way to make some money off yet another slice of our childhoods.