With its iconic covers featuring kids transforming into animals, ’90s book fair staple Animorphs served as many middle schoolers’ first taste of body horror.
We can only hope that the upcoming TV series — now in early development at Disney+ — will have the same effect on today’s youth.
Variety reports that Bayan Wolcott (“Class of ’09”) is attached to write and executive produce the adaptation, with Sinners filmmaker Ryan Coogler executive producing alongside Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian for Proximity Media.
The show 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.
Iole Lucchese and Caitlin Friedman will executive produce via Scholastic, who published the YA science fantasy series. Proximity Media’s Simone Harris and Dezi Gallegos will also oversee the project.
Created by authors Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, 54 Animorphs novels were released between 1996 and 2001. A TV series ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon from 1998 to 2000.
Each book was told the first-person perspective of one of the main characters — teenagers Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias — who discover that the Earth is being secretly taken over by a parasitic alien race known as Yeerks.
Variety explains, “The group meets a dying alien of the Andalite race, which has been fighting the Yeerks and their expansion across the galaxy. The Andalite gives them the ability to morph into any animal they touch by absorbing the animal’s DNA. They use this power to launch a secret resistance against the Yeerks and to save the world. They are later joined by Ax, a young Andalite stranded on Earth.”
An Animorphs feature film was in development back in 2020, but it never moved forward.
Proximity Media is currently under a TV overall deal with Disney, which has also spawned Coogler’s “The X-Files” reboot.
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