The game-to-movie pipeline is seemingly in full swing, particularly after the meteoric success of Nintendo’s 2023 animated comedy The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Now Margot Robbie, the star of Barbie (the only movie to beat Mario at the global box office last year), is set to produce a film adaption of Electronic Arts’ hugely popular franchise The Sims, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
As The Hollywood Reporter…reported…on March 20, The Sims is in the hands of Robbie’s production company LuckyChap Entertainment, with Kate Herron (Loki, The Last of Us) slated to direct the project. Herron will also co-write the screenplay alongside Briony Redman, an actress who’s starred in a few British shorts and shows and also wrote the sixth episode of Doctor Who’s latest season. The American film and television production company Vertigo Entertainment, which was recently attached to 2023’s supernatural horror film Five Nights at Freddy’s and the black horror anthology series Them, will co-produce the project next to Robbie’s LuckyChap. EA, the publisher of The Sims, will “be involved in a creative and producing capacity,” according to THR.
There were no casting announcements made just yet, so while LuckyChap is producing the film, it’s unclear if Robbie will actually appear in it. However, The Sims does make sense for LuckyChap. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, Barbie is just a toy that doesn’t have a rigidly established narrative. Rather, children who play with Barbie are free to create their own narratives. Similarly, The Sims is merely a life simulator that doesn’t have much of an established narrative either, freeing up players to create all kinds of scenarios and ascribe all kinds of meanings to the lives of their Sims. So, much like with the Barbie movie, those involved with the Sims film should have plenty of creative freedom in terms of how they interpret the games for the big screen. As long as the characters speak Simlish, the game’s made-up language, then we’re all good.
The Sims is a long-running series of life sim games by EA-owned studio Maxis. The last game in the series, The Sims 4, launched in 2014 and has had a myriad of updates in the decade since, from babies being actual people and not objects to vitiligo skin options for you Sims. Maxis is currently working on The Sims 5 which, while still without a release date, is looking to be a free-to-play game.
