There’s going to be a movie based The Sims, according to The Hollywood Reporter — and based on the people involved in producing and directing it, it’s worth taking pretty seriously.
The director is Kate Herron, who directed the entirety of the first season of Loki, which is arguably the high point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s adventures in television: smart, slippery, and fun, with a strong visual identity. Herron will co-write the Sims movie with Briony Redman; the pair are frequent collaborators who also wrote an episode of the forthcoming new season of Doctor Who.
The production company behind the Sims movie is even more significant. LuckyChap, which Margot Robbie runs with her husband Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara, and Sophia Kerr. LuckyChap can take a lion’s share of the credit for Robbie’s $1.4 billion 2023 smash hit Barbie (not to mention Emerald Fennell’s viral sensation Saltburn). It was the production company that threaded the almost impossible needle of turning the toy property into a good script from a credible director, Greta Gerwig, and then getting the whole improbable edifice approved by Mattel and financed by a major studio.
Those skills are obviously relevant to making a movie out of The Sims, which, like Barbie, has grown to be hugely popular without the need for any defined narrative, or even defined characters, to speak of. LuckyChap will have help in this regard from co-producers Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment, who produced (along with a huge number of horror flicks) the similarly challenging Lego movies, and have a hand in the forthcoming Minecraft film adaptation too.
Electronic Arts “will also be involved in a creative and producing capacity,” according to THR, although hopefully the publisher will be able to take a back seat and let its well-chosen partners cook.
But what will they cook up? With The Sims, the sky’s the limit: Maxis’ life simulation games follow the lives of whole families and societies of Sims from birth to death in a range of scenarios from stereotypically suburban to fantastical, and tend to generate storylines that tip from mild sitcom or soap into wild surrealism. The games seem ripe for exactly the kind of meta approach Gerwig brought to Barbie. Will there be woohooing? Will the whole thing be in Simlish with subtitles? We’ll have to wait to find out — the movie doesn’t have a release date yet.
