Paramount is developing a feature version of Robert C. O’Brien’s award-winning children’s tale “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” says The Hollywood Reporter.
Director Neil Burger (The Illusionist) is in talks to write the screenplay, and former Walden executive Cary Granat is on board to produce.
The film would be the second theatrical go-round for the book, which MGM brought to the screen in 1982 as the animated The Secret of NIMH, directed by Don Bluth.
The story centers on a mouse — the titular Mrs. Frisby, re-named Mrs. Brisby in the MGM movie — faced with a crisis when her son falls ill and she must move her family to escape a farmer’s plow.
Mrs. Frisby enlists a group of former lab rats, whom she soon discovers run a highly evolved society, who possess advanced technologies and divide labor in the manner of a human community.
