Choose Your Own Adventure Movie Coming To Theaters From Arrowverse Producer
After spending years bringing beloved characters from DC Comics to life, the producer behind the Arrowverse will let you choose your own adventure.
Fox is turning the page on a bold new experiment in interactive cinema, officially developing a theatrical movie based on the Choose Your Own Adventure series with producer Greg Berlanti, according to a writeup by The Hollywood Reporter.
The movie will be produced in conjunction with Kino Industries' Ctrl Movie, a company which purports to offer a "collaborative cinematic experience" that "empowers audiences to interact with movies in a game-like manner".
According to the company, the tech can be used to create narrative features with branching paths that rely on audience interaction to progress, with viewers able to control what characters do by making yes-no, binary decisions to advance the story. Reportedly, the branching paths will allow movies to have different plots, alternate endings, and run for different lengths.
It's more than fitting that the first application of the tech from Fox will be a direct adaptation of the long-running Choose Your Own Adventure book series, the many volumes of which allowed readers to puzzle their way through stories by flipping to this page or that page.
The books were launched in 1979 and ran until 1998, producing 184 stories before the original run was through. Since 2005, the series has been owned and published by Chooseco, who have revised the texts of the original books while continuing to produce new adventures.
In concept, the idea here doesn't sound too dissimilar to the experimental, interactive HBO series Mosaic, which also relied on app-based interactivity to make a unique experience for viewers. That series, though, was a solo endeavor, rather than a crowdsourced effort.
From the sounds of things, this Ctrl Movie tech will require viewers to democratically vote on how to progress the story — a process which is sure to be treated with maturity by everyone.
Having been to a few movie theaters in our time, it's hard to imagine how this experiment will work out. Fistfights or fellowship, you know? Would everyone in the theater team up to work toward a common goal? Or will there always be a contingent of holdouts trying to steer the story toward a tragic end?
It's one thing if a fellow theatergoer is chewing their food loudly, but another thing entirely if someone's in the corner trying to make a movie reach its worst possible end. If the idea proceeds to fruition, it'll be interesting to see how satisfying this experience really gets to be.
No release date, plot, or production details have yet been set for the Choose Your Own Adventure movie; We'll keep you posted as the news develops. Or... maybe we won't. It's really up to us at this point, yeah?