Fox Grabs 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Rights, Plans Cross-Platform Revival

For young kids harboring creative dreams in the early '80s, or ones who wanted a little bit of control in their fiction, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were pretty great. After a minor launch in the mid-'70s they went closer to mainstream a few years later, the series featured simple genre tales with branching pathways that took characters and readers to a wide variety of endpoints. (Some of those endpoints were gleefully violent, too.)

They're kitsch relics now, but the name still commands enough interest that Fox has bought the media rights to the series that includes over 200 books for various age groups.

How do you make a Choose Your Own Adventure movie? The very structure of a film is counter to the idea of the books. And so Fox wants "a cross-platform four-quadrant action adventure franchise," reports THR. Cross-platform, naturally, because the property lends itself to gaming and other non-linear media. That's where it really belongs.

The thing to take away from this is that there will potentially be a bunch of media properties bearing the Choose Your Own Adventure brand, but precisely what will be created is as yet unknown. Chances are we'll see a big-budget family-friendly movie to act as sales pitch for the whole shebang.

Now who will step up to buy the related Fighting Fantasy rights?