If anyone else announced that they were going to make a movie based on the Choose Your Own Adventure books, I would sigh with disdain. But the ones who announced it are Radio Silence, or in other words, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the creators of Ready or Not or Scream (2022). And, since they haven’t failed so far and have become a duo with their own voice and something to say, it might be worth seeing if they have something planned or if it will be the disaster that we all (yes, everyone) foresee.
If you go to the right, go to scene 16
If you are of a certain age, you will remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where you basically had to choose which path to follow in the book. Help the old lady or run away? Go to the haunted mansion or gear up at the store? The collection, which originally appeared from 1979 to 1998, has had new titles in recent years and, in some way, has managed to revitalize itself. Is it enough to bring the audience to the cinema? You never know in today’s Hollywood.
It is known that alongside them, in the script, will be Tom Bissell, who has not only worked on Andor and The Disaster Artist, but has also written 11 novels and is co-author of Uncharted 4 and Gears of War. So, he knows a thing or two about what he is doing. The only question is whether in times of video games and artificial intelligence, the adaptation of nostalgic books where the charm was, precisely, choosing your own path, has a place in the current box office.
For now, not much more is known: hopefully, they will try to do something similar to Bandersnatch, that episode of Black Mirror that Netflix ended up removing because it consumed too much of its servers but marked a turning point in non-linear storytelling (in fact, I would say it is the perfect adaptation of Choose Your Own Adventure). Will this team know what they are doing, or are we facing a fiasco that we didn’t even choose ourselves?