Variety is reporting that Avi Arad’s Seaside Entertainment and Columbia Pictures have acquired the screen rights to James Patterson’s popular young adult novel series Maximum Ride.  Patterson’s long-running saga (a fifth volume is due in 2009) centers around six kids who have been genetically altered with avian genes that allow them to fly.  When the kids escape from the hidden laboratory in which they are confined, their scientist creators send a gang of “erasers,” humans who have been altered by the addition of wolf genes, after them.

According to Variety Arad is hoping that Maximum Ride can become a new superhero franchise since the teen heroes have plenty of the requisite “elements of alienation and angst that resonate in those spandex-clad heroes.”  Don Payne (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) is writing the screenplay for Maximum Ride, which is Seaside Entertainment’s third announced project (the first two are a live action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell and a feature based on Capcom’s Lost Planet video game).

Each of Patterson’s Maximum Ride volumes has made it to #1 on the YA charts, and Yen Press will be releasing an OEL manga adaptation of the first Maximum Ride volume (The Angel Experiment) in January with a second manga volume due in October (see “Yen Press Announces New Manga”).