After a couple of live action disappointments, Oscar-nominated director Jason Reitman is making the move to animation with an adaptation of children’s book The Adventures Of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend.
Reitman, best known for directing acerbic comedies Juno, Thank You For Smoking and Young Adult, will be writing and directing the film for Dreamworks Animation. The studio has scored the year’s biggest animated hit to date with Home, making over $345m worldwide.
Beekle is a picture book written by Dan Santat that tells the story of an imaginary friend who is so unique that no kid could possibly imagine him so he must go on a quest to find a best mate.
“I was book shopping with my daughter, when a little tooth-shaped character in a paper crown stole our hearts,” Reitman said. “His name was Beekle and I’m honored to now be adapting Santat’s charming story into a feature film.”
Reitman’s decision to radically shift genres follows two major disappointments, both critically and commercially. The Kate Winslet-starring melodrama Labor Day was deemed “a glossy, cloying nullity of a film” by Peter Bradshaw and only scraped together $20m at the worldwide box office. His follow-up, last year’s ensemble drama Men, Women and Children was given a similarly rocky reception and made just $2.2m.
The director had been previously linked to I Would Only Rob Banks for My Family, a true-life tale of a bank-robbing family, scripted by Nick Hornby and an adaptation of Simon Rich’s novel Elliot Allagash.
