The December 8th launch of Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever marks the third consecutive year that Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney has seen one of his beloved books adapted as an animated feature on Disney Plus. While the original plan was for an adaptation of The Last Straw to hit the streaming service in 2023, Kinney noted that he switched gears when Disney approached him about putting together a holiday special instead. With quite a bit of work already done on The Last Straw, Kinney is hopeful that the project will make its way to the streamer soon but the idea of working around a theme also struck a chord with the writer.
While talking with us about Cabin Fever, Kinney revealed that as he works through developing each of his books into features for Disney Plus, he’s hoping to break out of the winter time frame and put together one of his projects as a summer movie.
“I would love to do a summer movie, eventually,” said Kinney. And as fans of the series might expect, the author already has one story in mind. “I’m really hoping we get to tell lots of stories including Dog Days because I think a really good summer movie would be fun.”
Published in 2009, Dog Days is the fourth book in the series. It details Greg’s adventures on the summer vacation between his seventh and eighth-grade years, one Greg remembers as possibly the worst summer ever. So far, each of the three Wimpy Kid animated features has been released in December but it’s possible that Disney would work with Kinney to roll one out during the summer allowing kids to take it in on their own summer vacation.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever is now streaming on Disney Plus.
