Choose Your Own Adventure Movie Is Coming — Here's What We Know
TL;DR: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (the Scream reboot duo) are directing an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure film for 20th Century Studios, with Andor writer Tom Bissell on script duty. The story follows three North family siblings rescuing their uncle in Nepal. No cast or release date yet, but expect a Disney+ Hotstar debut in India after theatrical release. The real question: can a theater actually pull off genuine audience choice?
Radio Silence just got handed one of the strangest IP adaptations in recent memory. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing duo who revived Scream and delivered the wildly profitable Ready or Not, are now adapting Choose Your Own Adventure into a feature film for 20th Century Studios. Variety confirmed the news on May 21.
Here's the part that actually matters: screenwriter Tom Bissell is attached. He's the guy who wrote Andor and Uncharted 4, which means he understands interactive narrative at a level most screenwriters don't. The IP itself sold 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998. That's not some forgotten brand being resurrected for a quick paycheck. People genuinely loved these books, and studios know it.
But there's a problem buried in the premise that nobody's talking about directly yet.
Why Radio Silence Actually Matters for This Project
Look, it's easy to dismiss this as "another IP adaptation directed by someone who had one hit." That's not the read here.
Radio Silence broke through with a segment in V/H/S (2012), then spent years developing Ready or Not. That 2019 film grossed $57.2 million worldwide on a $6 million budget — a 9x return, per Box Office Mojo. They didn't get lucky. They made something audiences wanted to see.
Their Scream work was sharper. Scream (2022) pulled in $137.8 million globally. The franchise felt alive again, not like a nostalgia cash-in. That's the kind of director sensibility that might actually care about preserving what made Choose Your Own Adventure special: reader agency.
Then Ready or Not 2: Here I Come underperformed. It happens. But it's worth noting because 20th Century Studios is betting on Radio Silence's instincts, not their recent box office wins. That's either visionary or risky. Probably both.
What most trade coverage skips over: this is the first time Radio Silence has taken on a project where the core appeal is structural, not tonal. Scream and Ready or Not worked because of voice and pacing. Choose Your Own Adventure works because of architecture. Those are fundamentally different muscles, and nothing in their filmography proves they can flex this one.
Before they touch Choose Your Own Adventure, Radio Silence is shooting a new Mummy film with Brendan Fraser. That project will tell us whether they can handle large-scale adventure filmmaking, exactly what the Nepal setting demands here.
The Nepal Story (and Why It's Not Generic)
Here's what we know about the actual plot: three siblings from the North family go on a quest to rescue their uncle in the Himalayan region of Nepal. Your choices determine what happens next.
That specificity matters. The film isn't slapping the Choose Your Own Adventure name onto a generic adventure. It's committing to the interactive premise that made the books special. And there's a regional angle worth noticing. Nepal as a central plot driver, not window dressing. For Indian audiences, that's genuinely rare in Hollywood productions.
Expect the theatrical release to roll through Disney's Indian network, which means wide distribution across multiplexes. Movie OTT currently tracks 20th Century Studios titles landing on Disney+ Hotstar in India following their theatrical windows, usually within 45 to 60 days. Films like Dial of Destiny and Alien: Romulus hit that pattern exactly.
Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu dub tracks are standard for Disney tentpoles in India. Given the Nepal setting, Hindi-speaking markets could see particularly aggressive marketing. Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker will have streaming availability locked in once release windows firm up.
The Format Problem Nobody's Really Solved Yet
And here's where it gets weird.
Tom Bissell isn't just a screenwriter. He's written about video games as narrative form (his 2010 book Extra Lives remains one of the sharpest pieces of games criticism in print). He worked on Uncharted 4, which Naughty Dog marketed as "one of the most cinematically ambitious games ever made." He knows how to structure player agency within a medium. But a theatrical film is a different beast entirely.
Netflix's Bandersnatch (2018) proved audiences will engage with choice-based storytelling. But it worked precisely because Netflix controlled the delivery mechanism. You pause on your couch, tap your choice, the story branches. A cinema can't do that. Not without extraordinary technical investment in in-theater voting systems or some hybrid model.
I keep coming back to this: the thing that made Choose Your Own Adventure valuable, genuine reader agency, is also the hardest thing to replicate on a fixed theatrical screen. Radio Silence and Bissell are talented. Talented doesn't guarantee they solve this correctly.
Tyler Gillett said in an earlier Variety interview that Radio Silence's goal is "to make something that feels genuinely alive and unpredictable." That's a direct quote from someone who's now been handed the most literally unpredictable IP in children's publishing history. The question is whether a theater full of strangers can maintain that unpredictability, or whether the "choose your own adventure" framing ends up being pure marketing.
Three Things Worth Comparing This To
Goosebumps (2015) — Sony. $158 million worldwide. Spawned a sequel and TV series. It worked because the property had built-in name recognition and the film didn't try to be precious about the source material.
Bandersnatch (2018) — Netflix. Critical success, but streaming-only. No theatrical comparison exists. The format worked because pausing and selecting is frictionless on a couch. Try that in a multiplex.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) — $208 million worldwide on a $150 million budget. Paramount spent heavily on fan outreach, screened early at SXSW to rapturous response, and still couldn't clear its production-plus-marketing costs in theatrical alone. The lesson: IP recognition and good reviews don't automatically convert to returns when your budget balloons past the safety line.
The Bandersnatch comparison is the one to keep in your head. It's also the one that suggests theatrical Choose Your Own Adventure is genuinely untested territory.
What Comes Next (and When to Actually Expect This)
Radio Silence has got The Mummy to finish first. Realistically? 2027 or 2028 for a theatrical window on Choose Your Own Adventure. Maybe 2026 if things move fast, but don't hold your breath.
Watch for three announcements:
- Cast reveal — the North family siblings need names and faces attached
- Director statement — how will the interactive element actually function on screen? This matters more than any trailer
- First trailer — this will either show genuine branching narrative or a conventional linear film dressed up as interactive
If 20th Century Studios commits to actual audience-choice mechanics in theaters, that's the story worth paying attention to. If "choose your own adventure" becomes a marketing hook for a traditional film? Different thing entirely.
Where to Track This
Movie OTT will update streaming and theatrical availability across India, the US, UK, and Spain as the project develops. No cast announced yet. No production start date. No confirmed runtime.
For now, it's a solid creative team attached to an interesting IP facing a format problem nobody's solved at scale.
The Nepal setting's real. The North family rescue mission is real. Whether Radio Silence can crack the theatrical choose-your-own-adventure puzzle?
Still an open question.
