About Two years ago MGM secured the rights to develop a new theatrical take on author Robert C. O’Brien‘s children’s classic, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Now, Variety reports that the film — which is being developed as a CGI and live-action hybrid — has brought aboard first-time director James Madigan. Madigan recently completed work as second unit director on the upcoming prehistoric shark thriller Meg. It also looks like the new film version with drop the Mrs. Frisby from the title and will simply be known as The Rats of NIMH.
Published in 1971 with accompanying illustrations by Zena Bernstein, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH follows the titular Mrs. Frisby, a recently-widowed field mouse who faces impossible odds in the quest to move her family before a farmer’s plow comes through. The text was famously adapted as an animated film, The Secret of NIMH, by Don Bluth in 1982.
MGM has set Ice Age 5 scribe Michael Berg to script the new film, which has Daniel Bobker and Ehren Kruger are producing.
O’Brien authored a sequel to his original book, Racso and the Rats of NIMH, which was published in 1986. R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH, a third book, was written in 1990 by O’Brien’s daughter, Jane Leslie Conly. The animated film version, meanwhile, received its own direct-to-video sequel in 1998 with The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue.
