Mandate Pictures, the company behind Juno, Drag Me To Hell and Nick &Norah, has picked up the movie rights to the book Your Are A Miserable Excuse For A Hero. The novel by Onion writer Bob Powers is a ‘choose your own adventure’ for adults, where a man goes on a succesful blind date, but then his new lady gets kidnapped. You then have to decide whether to go off on a daring rescue, or back down feeling anything else would be a bit too much commitment this early on in the relationship – and of course most of what you do turns out to be a disaster.
The person hoping to shepherd the book to cinemas is D.V. DeVincentis, who’s said, “I wanted to drop the most indecisive man on the planet and his idiot friends into a fast-moving action movie and see what happens.”
However the difficulty is in seeing how the book will work on screen, as unless they do a Sliding Doors type thing, where we see both what happens if the hero decides to save the girl and if he doesn’t, it sounds a bit like it’s going to just be a generic action comedy. After all, the necessarily thin plotting of the book doesn’t give them a huge amount to work with.
That said, as DeVincentis’ only movie writing credits are the excellent High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank, we wouldn’t write off anything he’s involved with, especially if he can get John Cusack involved.