Ryan Coogler is helping Disney+ develop a new Animorphs TV show

The Testaments' Bayan Wolcott is heading up the series, working with Coogler's Proximity Media and book series owner Scholastic.

By William Hughes  |  April 3, 2026 | 3:58pm
A completely normal, non-disturbing Animorphs cover, Image: Scholastic
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Ryan Coogler is helping Disney+ develop a new Animorphs TV show

In big news for fans of disturbing-looking book covers that ask the question “What is the halfway point between a tween and an ocelot?” and YA narratives that seem pretty lighthearted right up until the point where you realize “Whoops, I’m reading about child soldiers who now all have PTSD” alike, Variety reports that Disney+ is putting a new Animorphs TV series into development. The series is being developed by The Testaments and The Summer I Turned Pretty writer/producer Bayan Wolcott, working under the auspices of book series owner Scholastic and Proximity Media, the studio founded by Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, and director Ryan Coogler—who, between this and his X-Files reboot, seems bound and determined to revive every procedural that the weirdest kid in the classroom was really into back in the day.

Written by K.A. Applegate (and a whole host of ghost writers under Applegate’s Yeerk-like control), the Animorphs books were published by Scholastic from 1996 to 2001, telling an increasingly grim story about a bunch of Earth kids recruited into an interstellar war to save their planet and their loved ones, often focused on problems that could be most easily solved by turning into a gorilla. The series was previously adapted by Nickelodeon in the late ’90s, although the show was canceled after just two seasons on the kids’ network.

The new show is reportedly in “early development” at Disney+, which has had a lot of luck of late adapting well-loved YA franchises to TV; the streamer had an early success with a Goosebumps adaptation, and then an even bigger hit with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, and is presumably looking to colonize even more of the “Hey, I saw eight million of these things while walking through the YA section of Borders 20 years ago” nerve bundles still lurking, dormant, in its subscribers’ brains.

 
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