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Ryan Coogler knows ball. If that wasn’t already apparent from his award-winning filmmaking work in Black Panther, Creed, and Sinners, it’s becoming increasingly clear by the ’90s pop culture he’s revealed himself to be a fan of. Not only does the Bay Area writer-director already have a promising X-Files reboot lined up, but he’s about to lend his producing hand to another, lesser known ’90s treasure.
Variety reports that an Animorphs TV series is in the works at Disney+ with Bayan Wolcott writing and Ryan Coogler, Sev Ohanian, and Zinzi Coogler executive producing on behalf of Proximity Media. If the name “Animorphs” sounds familiar, please remember to get your cholesterol checked. If it doesn’t, congratulations on being born in the 21st century!
Animorphs is a sci-fi book series for young adults written by Katherine Applegate, her husband Michael Grant, and a handful of other ghostwriters under the name “K.A. Applegate.” Published over the span of 54 mainline books and 10 other auxiliary titles from 1996 to 2001, Animorphs follows the story of five pre-teens and an alien who are granted the ability to morph into animals to combat the threat of bodysnatching parasitic aliens known as “Yeerks” hellbent on infiltrating and enslaving the human species.
And it is so freaking rad.
While today the books may best be remembered for their striking cover art that depicts children slowly morphing into critters, the actual story contained within their pages is as gnarly as science fiction for children can get. To my aging brain’s recollection, here is a partial list of truly wild things that happen throughout Animorph‘s 54-book run.
Note: The following contains spoilers but not detailed spoilers, if that makes sense.
– A young boy is trapped in the form of a red-tailed hawk after staying in the morph longer than two hours. (He’s actually pretty stoked about it though as he hates his human life as a miserable orphan.)
– Another boy is trapped in the form of a mouse for the rest of his now-shortened life after he expresses genocidal delusions. (He is less stoked about this than the hawk boy).
– No fewer than 18 children are killed as enemy combatants in an intergalactic war.
– A 14-year-old leader of a guerrilla terrorist cell flushes two million defenseless aliens into space as a preeminent strike and develops complex PTSD.
– God, himself, is introduced as a character and is revealed to be a weird little alien guy who likes to play games against his archnemesis using sentient beings as pawns.
Even after all of that, the series ends on such a down note that the author herself felt compelled to include a postscript letter to her young readers explaining why there was no other way to conclude it. One key passage reads:
“Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.”
Near the letter’s conclusion, she even included a more direct call-to-action to the readership, saying if they didn’t like the way the Animorphs’ war against the Yeerks resolved, that was fine because “pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.”
The final Animorphs book, that letter included, was published in May 2001… just four months before the events of September 11 would enmesh the United States in two wars and more than two decades of uninterrupted foreign conflicts.
If Animorphs‘ depiction of young people in mortal danger doesn’t sound particularly radical to a generation of readers who grew up with Katniss Everdeen and Harry Potter, I get it. But please understand that the world of young adult literature pre-Hunger Games was much different from what came after. Animorphs‘ publishing contemporaries were Goosebumps and Holes while Hunger Games arrived via imagery and footage of real life war all over television and a developing internet.
Previous attempts to adapt the books have mostly been dismal failures. An announced Animorphs movie in 2020 never went anywhere and the early 2000s live-action TV series lasted only a couple of seasons on Nickelodeon. Even the seemingly successful graphic novel adaptations appear to have fizzled out after book 6 was released in March 2025.
With Ryan Coogler and a seasoned audience in tow, now might finally be the time that Animorphs soars.
The post Ryan Coogler Will Produce a TV Adaptation of the Most Out-of-Pocket YA Book Series Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.
