Turtles All the Way Down was released in 2017 by John Green, the author famous for books such as The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Town, and Looking For Alaska. Many of these books have gotten film adaptations and Turtles All the Way Down will be the newest edition.

Fox 2000 previously was going to house the production but it was then transferred to HBO Max. Director Hannah Marks, a previous actress, was hired for the project and will be one of the youngest female directors in Hollywood at the age of 25. Isabela Merced is confirmed as the lead for the production having previous roles in Transformers, Dora and the Lost City of Gold. 

“The Turtles All the Way Down movie has found its director. Hannah Marks will helm the John Green adaptation, making the 25-year-old one of the youngest female studio directors in movie history. The Turtles All the Way Down story centers on a 16-year-old-girl with OCD tracking the mystery of a fugitive billionaire. This is the third of Green’s books to get a feature adaptation, following The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns,” says Chris Evangelista of Slash Film. 

Turtles All the Way Down became a New York Times bestseller and received great reviews for the main character Aza as a young girl who struggles with OCD. The book borrows its realism from author Green who struggles daily with the disorder. Aza tries to solve a mystery of a billionaire gone missing in hopes of claiming the reward, while her OCD gets in the way.

“I wanted to write a detective story about a detective whose brain disorder is unhelpful. Because there are so many detective stories about obsessive people who are brilliant detectives because of their obsessiveness and my experience with obsessiveness has been more or less the complete opposite. I wanted to write a detective story where the plot keeps getting interrupted by this person’s inability to live in the world in the way that she wants to,” Green said in an interview with Time Magazine.

Green’s most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars, was the first of his works to take the screen in 2014 starring Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley and has become one of the most popular 21st-century teen films. Quickly following was a film rendition of the book Paper Towns in 2015 starring Cara Delevingne and Nat Wolff. Paper Towns was not as well-received as The Fault in Our Stars leaving speculation as to how well a production of Turtles All the Way Down will go.