Can Someone Please Get HBO-Money For a Proper ‘Animorphs’ Live Action?

We live in a time where established properties are considered a sound investment. This is why, among other things, we’re getting an Avatar: The Last Airbender live action adaptation, we got a One Piece live action adaptation, there’s a second attempt at Percy Jackson and the Olympians currently airing, and why the Hunger Games got a prequel movie. The media making machines likes known values, safe bets, a return on investment that is guaranteed.

Which is why I’m perpetually baffled when yet another year passes without a proper live-action adaptation of K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs. The mid-1990’s that bled over to the earliest of the 2000’s young adult science fiction was one of the most iconic novel series of that era. You couldn’t go to a library or bookstore without seeing the shelves lined with the book, each with a cover of a human transforming into an animal (and well… a couple other transformations here and there, but that’s beside the point). This was one of my first forays into serialized fiction and endeared me to reading alongside its horror anthology counterpart R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. And as another aside, Goosebumps managed to have a very successful live action modernization just last year, so I’m holding out hope that the trend continues for a long time to come.

The premise, which I know by heart but the IP is nearing three decades, is that after taking a short cut through a construction site, five teenagers fin…