BREAKING: If Jason Segel isn’t careful, the writer side of his brain might eclipse the actor side. Segel, whose script work includes The Muppets and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, has just made his first big publishing deal. Random House Children’s Books has acquired Nightmares!, a middle-grade fiction series that Segel will write with bestselling author Kirsten Miller (The Eternal Ones) for the Random House imprint Delacorte Press Books For Young Readers. The deal was made by RHCB president/publisher Barbara Marcus and the Delacorte imprint’s veep and publisher Beverly Horowitz, with Segal’s reps at WME and Abrams Entertainment.
Nightmares! is an adventure story about a group of kids who realize it’s up to them to save their town from fear, which has manifested itself in the form of nightmare creatures that have slipped into the everyday world. At its heart, the series is about kids overcoming their fears. Segel first hatched the premise as a movie project. He wrote a screenplay years ago that subsequently went into turnaround. Segel took it back and reverse–adapted it as a book. Don’t be surprised if the script suddenly becomes hot stuff as a movie project that mixes scares with humor. The first book will be published in fall 2014.
This is the first book deal for Segel — who started on Freaks And Geeks and is still starring in How I Met Your Mother — beyond all of the movie roles and work writing music, scripts and producing for the big screen.
“I couldn’t be more excited that Nightmares! has found a home at Random House,” Segel said in a statement. “Ultimately, it’s a story about learning that we can accomplish anything, as long as we are brave enough to try. These are the types of stories that always inspired me.”
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“Jason Segel has the perfect voice to write for children,” says Marcus. “Nightmares! is inventive, genuine, and relatable to middle-grade readers. We’re thrilled to see Jason’s creative vision translated to the page, and can’t wait to introduce him to the publishing world as a tremendous new talent.”
He is awesome. This is awesome. I cannot wait to work with him again… And I cannot wait to buy these books for my daughter and read them myself.
This sounds fun but I’m fairly certain it was the plot of one of the Goosebumps books. Don’t ask me which one but it sounds very familiar.
I think it was also the plot of Rise of the Guardians too. I might be wrong though.
This is actually the plot to a spec that was picked up years ago by Dreamworks called “The Nightmare of Hugo Bearing.” It was written by the Hageman Brothers.
You’re right! I remember that script.
Hmmmmmmmmmm
I’m going to buy the books, even though I don’t have children. :D
…so he’s writing a children’s book version of Stephen King’s IT?
Great agent, great agent, great agent….& talent = $$$
The formula looks good except for the talent variable.
Good for Jason – a smart, talented guy. He and the HIMYM team are terrific, and it’s good to see him branching out into new endeavors that will challenge him and take him in new directions.
Kind of funny and ironic – I recently read (I think it was here at Deadline) a quote from a TV/movie screenwriter’s agent who said the way things are going in Hollywood, the only way to catch anyone’s attention at a network or movie studio if you have a script is to adapt it from a book. “Every studio/network executive is looking for scripts developed from book adaptations. So now, we’re all running around looking to purchase the rights to books for script development.”
This scenario may well happen to Jason as well. He writes a good screenplay, it gets stuck in studio-limbo, turns the screenplay into a book, adapts the book back into the screenplay, and voila’ – the studios execs come calling. Beautiful irony.
All the Book sites picked up on this last week, but they reported that 1.) the books were all done and 2.) he wrote them all himself.
Muppets was a joke. So was Sarah Marshall…
He should only speak Apatow… The rest is gibberish.
He missed an opportunity when Social Network came out to appear on talk shows with Armie Hammer as his digital twin stand-in who let himself go since the film wrapped. Hammer could have been in Muppets to try and woo Amy Adams.
Weak.