I don't even know that structure/format is an issue for The Invasion as such, the first book basically plays like a Spielberg/Amblin flick from the glory days as it is. Beat-for-beat, page-for-page, you could transcribe #1 as it is and it works as a movie.
It's after that where it becomes a problem. Yeah, there are filler books no doubt, but like 2/3 of the 54 books have important lore/setup stuff you can't just omit. I kinda feel when you start playing the mix-and-match game with plot points and trying to condense stuff into other stories, that's where it's going to get messy and potentially lose impact.
A show's a cool notion format-wise, sure, but effects and budget aren't there, not even now. You kind of need a movie budget for the full potential of the Pool, of the scrappy (undoubtedly CG animals) fights, all that jazz. Not even sure
movies do living creatures all that convincingly with CG personally, but at least there's precedent for getting close among the really high-end A-level productions.
Tone's more what I'm worried about. Animorphs is a weird one in that the light & silly stuff is really light & silly, and the dark stuff is
dark. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the suits decide to just really go for it, and they find a director with the chops to go there, but...yeah. It'd be the exception rather than the rule, and I doubt Katherine & Michael have much say in the matter once Scholastic has decided the thing's going ahead.
Honestly, Animorphs probably needs to be somewhere in the vicinity of, like, Terminator 2 without the cussing or 80% of the blood, methinks. Harder-edged than the superhero movies. Obviously with all the humor & playful sarcasm & weirdness in-tact, yeah, but when the stuff's going down, it's gotta really go down.
Also, does this even work in a world of cell phones & social media & the current zeitgeist? Animorphs was
so 90s - and that's not a criticism - I'm just trying to figure it out. Insidious threats & guerilla warfare on home turf & general paranoia aren't exactly foreign concepts to kids these days in a post-9/11 world. Half of the thing with the books was taking these 13/14 year old suburban kids who'd never even had to consider such things, and really throwing them in the middle. 1990s Bill Clinton peacetime USA. Nothin' going on that a kid really had to worry about, not at home. That's all out the window as of the 2000s. Kinda feel like you lose something setting it now - and they're absolutely going to set it now, too much demographic $$$ in play.
Gonna wait though, no point assuming it'll be as tempered & punch-pulling as we're used to. To be fair, a lot of the YA adaptations we've seen on-screen are based on some slightly-tamer material anyway, probably even Hunger Games is a bit more restrained in some ways than Animorphs was. So
maybe they'll embrace and run with it? *Shrugs*
Michael (freakin') Keaton is Batman again, that's not a sentence I thought I'd ever speak. So, strange things happen. Could be in 6 months Katherine & Michael come out announcing Scholactic's secured Fincher or Cuaron or someone equally-unrealistic to direct the fricker.
Not gonna happen, but...Michael Keaton's Batman again. Crazy radness abounds on rare occasion.
