I AM NUMBER FOUR is Getting a Reboot
The Popular Young Adult Book Series Gets A Second Chance At Life
I AM NUMBER FOUR is the first book in the Lorien Legacies series of young adult science fiction books, written by a trio of authors – James Frey, Jobie Hughes, and Greg Boose – under the collective pseudonym Pittacus Lore. The book centers on the conflict between two extraterrestrial species and a teenage alien known as Number Four, who is hiding on Earth from intergalactic assassins.
Published in 2010, the book spent seven weeks at #1 on the children’s version of the New York Times bestseller list. This led DreamWorks Pictures to buy the rights to the book and adapt it as a film of the same name starring Alex Pettyfer. The movie version was produced by Michael Bay and written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Marti Noxon.
For those who don’t follow who the screenwriters are on movies, the Gough/Millar/Noxon team is known for their work on Smallville, Into The Badlands, Netflix’s Wednesday, and Spider-Man 2. They’re also working on the sequel to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.
Despite the caliber of the people working on the movie and the popularity of the books, the film version of I AM NUMBER FOUR was widely panned by critics. However, made for a $50 million budget, it scored a respectable $149.9 million box office take.
But this is Hollywood, and a $150 million gross was considered a major disappointment for a potential new franchise. Due to the underperformance of the film, plans for sequels were scrapped, and many considered anything to do with I AM NUMBER FOUR and the Lorien Legacies series to be dead and buried, at least as far as Hollywood goes. But in a recent interview with the SFF Gazette, author James Frey shared an update on plans for a potential reboot of the popular young adult book series.
“Neal Moritz is producing a version of it that was written by the original writers, [Alfred Gough] and [Miles Millar], who just made Wednesday. So, we are in process on it and I can’t say whether it will actually ever get made or not, but I have great people I’m working with who are trying to make it happen, for sure.”
The renewed interest in I AM NUMBER FOUR stems from the success of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series on Disney+, which took the failed Percy Jackson film franchise and recreated it for a new audience that embraced the adaptation on the small screen. Obviously, any reboot of I AM NUMBER FOUR would involve a new cast, but all signs point to the reboot being a TV series on streaming rather than a movie, just like the Percy Jackson franchise.
Though it appears DreamWorks still holds the film rights to the series, the original movie was distributed by Disney, and it would seem that any reboot of the series would be for the Disney+ streaming service, which is in desperate need of hit series to attract new subscribers and keep their current subscriber base from canceling. That being said, producer Neal Moritz has a close working relationship with Universal, which has distributed all of the DreamWorks properties lately, so there’s a possibility the show could be created for the Peacock streaming service.
No matter what streaming service the show is being made for, the real question is: Will anyone be interested enough to watch it?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
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