The rights to make a live-action movie based on popular kids book series Where’s Waldo? have been floating around for a while, but now Universal Pictures has shown off their vertical leap and grabbed hold of the property.

The books, created by Martin Handford, offered up endless pages of large crowds of people in which you would spend hours trying to locate the man they called Waldo, who was always dressed in his matching red and white clothing scheme. While the books were always a good time for kids and a nice time-waster for incredibly bored adults, it is pretty unlikely that this will be two hours of live action shots of huge crowds that we will search through for the elusive little Bill Gates look-alike. First to find him wins a box of Juji Fruit. Wait, that actually sounds pretty fun. Well-played, Waldo.

Alright, that won’t happen, so what will this little doozy be about? It appears that the movie will follow a 30-something-year old Waldo who ends up traveling through time after accidentally setting off a time machine that had been working improperly.

Obviously Where’s Waldo? will be more aimed at children and families, but no word yet to what extent. All that is really known so far is that Chris Meledandri‘s of Illumination Entertainment will be producing. When the property was owned by Paramount, John Schultz was hired to direct the screenplay written by Adam Rifkin, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage. It’s probable that a new writer/director team will be put together for the project instead, but who knows, maybe Universal likes what these guys created.

[Source: THR]