Paramount Players & Alloy Entertainment Adapting YA Novel ‘Frankly In Love’; Unjoo Moon To Direct

Aloft PR

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Unjoo Moon has signed on to direct the Alloy Entertainment book adaptation Frankly in Love for Paramount Players, Deadline has learned.

The movie project is inspired by the same-name novel from David Yoon, which Time magazine called one of the best YA books of all time.

The book follows high school senior Frank Li, who in an attempt to get the girl of his dreams without upsetting his traditional Korean-American parents, concocts a plan to pretend to date his parent-approved friend Joy, but ultimately is left wondering if he ever really understood love—or himself—at all.

Allison Lee (Jawbone) and Evan Dodson (Lee Daniels’ Terms of Endearment) adapted the screenplay. Leslie Morgenstein and Elysa Koplovitz Dutton will produce through Alloy. Taylor Tang will oversee the project for Paramount Players.

Moon’s credits include I Am Woman, the story of legendary, award-winning singer-songwriter Helen Reddy, and The Zen of Bennett, a feature documentary about Grammy- and Emmy-winning singer Tony Bennett. She is repped by CAA.

Frankly in Love served as the debut novel for Yoon and was the subject of an intense bidding war when Alloy Entertainment licensed the book rights to Penguin Young Readers in 2019.

In addition to Alloy’s blockbuster television franchises—Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, You, The 100, Pretty Little Liars—Alloy has produced five feature films in the past four years including Purple Hearts, starring Sofia Carson and Nicholas Galitzine, currently in production for Netflix.