There’s An ‘Animorphs’ TV Show In Development

If you’re anything like me, you remember exactly what it felt like to go to the library as a kid and finally get your hands on the next installment in your new favorite chapter book series. And for many of us millennials, one such series was Animorphs by Katherine Applegate. So imagine my delight when news broke that there is a brand new Animorphs TV series in development. While the announcement is fresh and details are still slim, here’s everything we know right now.

The Animorphs TV series “is in early development at Disney+,” according to a Variety exclusive. Bayan Wolcott (The Testaments, The Summer I Turned Pretty) will write and executive-produce the adaptation, while Ryan and Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian of Sinners fame will executive-produce on behalf of Proximity Media. The books’ publisher, Scholastic, will also be heavily involved in production, which is encouraging for fans of the source material.

Neither Katherine Applegate nor her writing partner and husband, Michael Grant, is listed in the article, and based on a post to Bluesky, it seems the pair is not involved with the screen adaptation:

“Michael Grant and I have concerns that the project is under-resourced. But one of the producers, Sev Ohanian, is a friend, as well as a genuine Animorphs fan. If anyone can make it work, he can. Fingers crossed,” the author wrote.

Variety also reported that the new adaptation’s official logline states it will “follow a group of teenagers who uncover a hidden threat lurking beneath their everyday lives, all while juggling relationships, curfews, and the chaos of high school.”

If you don’t remember the details or never read the series, that description is mostly in line with what’s in the books. Animorphs follows five human teenagers — Jake, Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and Rachel — along with alien friend Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill (Ax for short), as they battle against the Yeerks, a parasitic alien race secretly infiltrating Earth. Yeerks can use anyone’s body as a host by slithering their slug-like bodies into the host’s ear, but the teens have their own superpower — they can turn into any animal they touch. The series is a whopping 54 books long, all of which were published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001.

This won’t be the first time Animorphs has been adapted for the screen — Nickelodeon originally aired a TV series based on the books from 1998 to 2000, and you can still find these nostalgia bombs on YouTube. (Yes, that’s a young Shawn Ashmore playing Jake.)

One significant change the new adaptation may make from the books, however, is that the friends are all 13 years old when the first Animorphs book opens. Starting them off in high school may just mean they’re aged up by one year, or perhaps they’ll be older. Some later books in the series deal with dark themes — Laura Hurley for Yahoo! recalls there being scenes about torture, war crimes, suicide, and biological warfare. So, maybe the showrunners wanted the characters involved to be at least a little bit older, a la Stranger Things. We’ll have to wait and see.

This year actually marks 30 years since the first Animorphs installment was published, bearing what would become some of the most iconic cover art in children’s literature created by the talented David Mattingly. In honor of the series’ anniversary, Scholastic is re-releasing the first three books (The Invasion, The Visitor, and The Encounter) in May 2026 with brand new cover art by artist Zoe Van Dijk.

While we likely won’t get the TV series version during this 30th year celebration, the news that we’ll finally get to see Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, Tobias, and Ax transform into animals with our own eyes is very, very exciting. Give us all the Andalites and Yeerks now, please.