The Bad Guys is released in cinemas in Australia on 31 March, in the UK on 1 April and in the US on 22 April.Champagne and martini glasses are seen at parties one character accepts what appears to be a martini. “Thirteen-year-old me would be so pleased with what I am doing!”

“I am in a place of playfulness,” he says. “If kids are struggling with reading, rather than carrying around a picture book, they think it’s cooler to have a copy of The Bad Guys.”Īlthough he plans to take a break from his hectic schedule in a couple of years, Blabey is happy where he is now. “Reluctant readers just dig them and they’ve latched on to it,” Blabey says. The spirit of the books – anarchic, but warm-hearted – is something children all over the world connect with, particularly those who are not natural readers. “All the studios could just smell the potential – in a single week in 2016 I met with the heads of all the major studios and three or four aggressively pursued it,” he says.įor a children’s film, The Bad Guys is rather sexy and noirish, set in an imagined LA that evokes LA Confidential, Ocean’s Eleven and Pulp Fiction Blabey describes it as “oversaturated sunlight as seen from a window of a diner.” The script was written by Etan Cohen, of Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder fame “everytime I opened each draft I thought, ‘he gets this,’” says Blabey, who served as an executive producer on the film, “to keep the spirit of the books safe.” With his success, Blabey is finally getting LA’s red carpet treatment as an author, that he could only dream about getting as an actor. He sounds genuinely awestruck as he recalls seeing Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs for the first time, in a Melbourne cinema when he was 18. That space in the middle is where the right balance is.”īlabey has never met Tarantino, whose influence casts a noirish shadow (refracted through a gentle lens) over the film and the books, but Tarantino is “one of the five people in the world, if I met him, I think I’d have a heart attack,” he says. I just started to think about the stuff I loved as kid.” He wondered if he could “hot wire” books, incorporating “iconography, like Tarantino’s films, that’s not suitable to kids, but not neuter it, do it in such in a way that you leave out the bits that are too scary or too full on.” He has a formula he follows for every book: “On my wall I have written ‘smart/dumb’ and ‘scary/funny’. The original inspiration for the series came from Blabey’s then six-year-old son, who was bringing home “these unforgivably boring readers.

The bad guys book 2022