Now, he spends a little more time thinking about his characters and their adventures, even if he and his readers can't always agree on who the best Bad Guy is. The author, who's dubbed himself the 'epitome of a late bloomer,' no longer has to worry about paying the bills with his writing. Now, one of Blabey's last-chance ideas - now 14 books long, with the 15th Bad Guys graphic novel set to release this July - is a hit movie with a shot at becoming a hit movie franchise. 'We both laughed and I didn’t think about that again until I found myself in Hollywood, talking to all the studios and being at DreamWorks.'

'All of those ideas converged on a walk through the countryside in 2014, and when I wrote the idea down with all the character names, I texted a friend and said, 'What do you think of this?' and she texted back, 'That sounds like a DreamWorks movie,'' Blabey recalled. Inspired in part by his love of Quentin Tarantino films and driven by his desire to write a book that would be 'as exciting as playing Xbox or watching a movie' for kids, Blabey solidified the concept over the course of a long walk, then got an interesting prediction from a friend. It was simple: At the age of 40, he would either come up with an idea that would make him a full-time author, or surrender himself to a corporate job.īlabey quickly came up with several concepts that would later be books, including The Bad Guys, a gang of anthropomorphized animal criminals who decide that they're going straight, and they're going to be good guys no matter what people think. In an interview with The New York Times over the weekend to promote the film adaptation, loosely based on the first four books in his series, Blabey explained that The Bad Guys came about in part because he'd given himself an ultimatum as an author working a string of day jobs to keep his family afloat. Throw in a wave of positive reviews for the new film based on the animated book series by Aaron Blabey, and it looks like The Bad Guys is an original animation hit for DreamWorks.įor Blabey, who's sold more than 30 million children's books in no small part thanks to the launch of The Bad Guys series in 2015, it's both an unlikely success story and a sort of prophecy fulfilled.

Over the weekend, DreamWorks Animation's The Bad Guysbecame the new box office champion, overtaking Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with a $24 million domestic haul and an A CinemaScore from moviegoers.

The bad guys aaron blabey series