Perks of Being a Wallflower Movie

By Katey Rich
Published: 2011-02-10 07:36:59
Emma Watson And Logan Lerman Confirmed For Summit's Perks Of Being A Wallflower It was nearly a year ago that we first wrote the news about Harry Potter's Hermione Emma Watson and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief's Logan Lerman starring in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky's iconic young adult novel. For some reason it's taken all this time for the news to become official, but Summit Entertainment has sent out a press release saying the project is still on, and Chbosky himself will be writing the adaptation and directing it as well.

It won't be Chbosky's first effort for the screen-- he also wrote the screenplay adaptation for the movie Rent-- but he'll be joining a pretty rare crowd of authors given the chance to write and direct adaptations of their own work, and for a major studio no less. In Wallflower Lerman will star as Charlie, the very definition of a mixed-up teenage kid who falls in with a crowd of older outcasts, including step-siblings Patrick and Samantha (Watson). The book is told in first-person as a series of letters to an unnamed person and a lot of narration takes place inside Charlie's head, just two of the many, many obstacles that stand in the way of Wallflower making as fraction a good movie as it did a book.

Having Chbosky involved should calm down the book's legions of fans, and hey, Summit knows a thing or two when it comes to adapting well-loved young-adult novels for massive audiences. But I'm still really skeptical about how this movie might work out, especially with pretty and confident Lerman playing Charlie, not at all the scrawny outcast I'd imagined. Watson is plenty talented to take on the role-- she'll be shooting this summer, presumably during her summer break from Brown-- but even the talented Hermione isn't enough to convince me this will work as well as I want it to.