As Hollywood continues to scorch the Earth of our favorite childhood classics, the latest victim is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series, which was optioned by Red Crown Productions. You may know Red Crown’s previous work… nothing. The one-year old company has a few products in the works, including Goats, starring David Duchovny, but it seems that the Adventure books might be Red Crown’s first attempt at a franchise.

The books, for those who don’t recall, told exciting and thrilling stories with plots that depended on the reader’s choice. My favorite part of reading them was choosing the wrong option and then going back and pretending like it didn’t happen, which will sound awfully familiar to whichever actors eventually sign on.

Do you follow the hobbled thief into the swamp or do you wank dismissively, Variety?

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    This could get serious.

Gillian Anderson attended the Sarajevo Film Festival (still looking good) and commented on the possibility of a third X-Files movie.  Radar provides a translation:

Gillian Anderson is giving hope to The X-Files fanatics everywhere that she and David Duchnovy may reunite for a third installment in the film series.  “There isn’t any reason not to do it,” the actress said during an appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
“I feel a certain commitment to that group of people that I worked with and we still enjoy doing it, when we do it. There is no reason why not to come together and do it again. If they can pull it off, we’ll find some reason to make it.”
The film could be out in 2012, Anderson said.

I would only be interested in this if they went in one of three directions with it:

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X-Files: I Want to Believe isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it might be one of the more half-assed. 10 years separate the first X-Files movie from the sequel.  10 years, and yet in all that time they never managed to get a script beyond the outline stage.  That’s really what this is: a script outline, a series of scenes only loosely tied together with some of the lamest expository dialogue since Independence Day.

See, the tough part of writing anything is the little details, those plausible yet novel sequences of events that connect one concept to another.  The concepts themselves are important too, but that’s the creative part, the fun part.  Connecting those concepts requires work, not just ideas but critical thinking.  The writers of X-Files 2, meanwhile, seem to have discovered a novel method for bypassing all that by just having Scully look shit up on the internet.  No, really.  At one point Dr. Scully is trying to save a kid with an incurable brain disease (and I’m being extremely generous by not making fun of the kid’s unintentionally hilarious mongoloid speech right now); she goes from having no treatment for the kid one day, then that night we see her Google – seriously, we actually watch her type this into Google – “stem cell research”.  And voila! The next day Scully miraculously has a radical new stem cell treatment for the boy.  Between the way they envision a doctor’s research process and the way they structure their script, you really get a sense of what the writers’ concept of hard work must be.

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For whatever reason, this trailer (after the jump) was in Russian when it first hit the web.  Now that it’s in English, it’s not as pantscraptastic, but it does give you a better sense of what the plot will be.  Billy Connelly plays a grizzled psychic trying to solve a murder (you can tell by accent and the bleeding from the eyes).  Amanda Peete plays the agent who brings Mulder onto the case.  “I called you in because I value your belief in this phenomenon,” she says.  “I’m not the most popular girl at the FBI right now.”  I’m guessing because she’s a prude.  No one likes a prude.  You know, someone should really step in and pimp her ride.  But who…
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^{WATCH THE NEW RUSSIAN TRAILER FOR X-FILES 2 AFTER THE JUMP} 

20th Century Fox has released a new trailer for X-Files 2 (X-Files: I Want to Believe).  It’s all in Russian, and it’s way better that way.  Russian isn’t the best language for, say, singing your kitty a lullaby, but it’s great for making me crap my pants in fear. 

There’s an English translation available on this site.  I don’t know who the translator is or what his credentials are, but his explanation sounds a lot more plausible than Babelfish, which said Gillian Anderson stands to inherit a sizable oil fortune but needs a cashier’s check in order to clean up a snafu at customs.  Goddamn bureaucratic red tape.    (Opens July 25th)