If a Choose Your Own Adventure feature film is in the works, why not make an Encyclopedia Brown movie too? Heat Vision reports that Warner Bros. is in talks to acquire the feature film rights to the children’s book series Encyclopedia Brown, which centers on kid detectives. Author Donald J. Sobol wrote nearly 30 Encyclopedia Brown books throughout his career, beginning with the first novel in 1963. The mystery series centers on the son of a local police chief named Leroy Brown who runs his own detective agency out of his family’s garage. Roy Lee and Howard David Deutsch will produce the film iteration, but it’s unknown if the book series' petty crimes will be upgraded to more serious fare in order to raise the stakes of the feature film. In the books, Brown generally solved appropriately minor crimes, many of which were perpetrated by the bully Bugs Meany.
This isn’t the first time Encyclopedia Brown has been adapted for the screen. HBO produced a handful of 30-minute episodes for a TV series iteration in 1989, which was also produced by Deutsch. Feature film adaptations have also been attempted in the past, but to no avail.