Brian Selznick's Run Away With Me Is Headed to the Screen, With Rome as the Setting

Gianni Nunnari will produce a film adaptation of Run Away With Me, the young adult novel by Brian Selznick, and Selznick will adapt his own book for the screen. Deadline reported the news on Thursday, 22 October 2026.

Nunnari will produce through his Hollywood Gang Productions banner. He was born in Rome, and the film is planned to be shot on location in the city where the story takes place.

The novel was published by Scholastic in 2025. It is set in Rome in the 1980s and follows Danny, a 16-year-old American who spends the summer in Italy. There he meets Angelo, an Italian boy, and the two form the heart of the story.

What makes the book unusual is its look. It mixes more than 100 pages of Selznick's illustrations with prose, so the pictures and the words share the telling. It is also the first novel Selznick wrote specifically for a young adult audience, the readers roughly in their teens.

Deborah Belford de Furia is set as an executive producer on the film. James Canellos and Michael Ritter will also executive produce. Selznick is represented by CAA, the Hollywood talent agency.

Film projects can take years to move from announcement to cinema screen. Each step, from financing and casting to choosing locations and a release date, depends on decisions made by different people at different times.

For readers who have followed Selznick's books, the news is a sign that his stories are reaching a new kind of audience. The adaptation brings his mix of pictures and prose to a medium built around moving images, and it returns the story to the city where it begins.