Unrealized Dreams: The Untold Story of The Sims Movie that Never Made it to the Big Screen | Games

circleMargot Robbie I plan to make a movie Based on the iconic life-simulation video game The Sims, the first reaction of many was, “How on earth do you turn The Sims into a movie?” It may be one of the best-selling game franchises of all time, but the bottom line is that there is no storyline whatsoever. The key is that it’s a sandbox life simulation, where players can do whatever they want.

This has happened before: In 2007, it was announced that a film based on The Sims would be released after then-20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios) acquired the rights, to be written by Brian Lynch, Hollywood’s screenwriter of choice for some of the most successful and critically acclaimed animated family films of the past decade, including Puss in Boots (2011), Minions (2015), Minions: The Revenge of Gru (2022), and The Secret Life of Pets.

Lynch’s “The Sims” films, he says, were adventures of wish-fulfillment: Put simply, “a kid discovers that everything he does in a Sims game happens in his town the next day. He creates the life he’s always wanted, and it spirals out of control.”

Lynch says the script was inspired by blockbuster films like Weird Science and Bruce Almighty, with a teen comedy feel reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin films. “My script is about a timid teenager who overthinks every moment of his life. He recreates his entire town in a Sims game as a way to experiment with interactions and relationships. He starts off with small changes and then has more fun with it.”

Things go wrong, the town starts to spin out of control, and “some bad kid from the town takes control and becomes like an angry god and turns the town into a giant video game world with monsters, and the protagonist, who has no powers or abilities at the time, has to stop him,” he says.

This was a Sims movie we never get to see, and it had a “weird character,” Lynch says. “The kid playing God leads into big, weird scenes, super-insane versions of his school and his family, and some really cool visuals.”

This take on the franchise was well received by executives, and the heads of Sims developers EA and Fox all agreed. Ultimately, the game industry heavyweights gave the green light.

“Producer John Davis (Predator, Garfield) invited me into his offices to pitch someone, but I had no idea who he was. They had never introduced us and I had pitched to so many people at that point that I assumed it was someone else, either Fox or another exec at EA,” Lynch says.

“After the presentation, as we were hanging out, I realized it was Will Wright, the creator of The Sims. I wish I hadn’t known it was him. I would have been really nervous.”

At the time, some fans were against the news that The Sims was coming to the big screen. “When it was announced, it was heavily panned. People assumed it was just a money-making scheme because the story wasn’t revealed,” Lynch says. But the film is sure to be full of tidbits for fans to enjoy, and Lynch flew to EA’s headquarters in California to work with the filmmaking team. “When the game starts to glitch, everyone except the main character speaks Simlish,” Lynch says.

One particularly amusing reference is when the protagonist downloads a celebrity expansion pack: “It would have been cool to have famous people playing themselves, walking around the town and the school, but the main characters would have all been unknowns, and I think that was one of the reasons Fox didn’t make it,” Lynch says.

Unsurprisingly, money was another reason the film fell through: “It was live-action but with a lot of special effects, which I think ultimately caused it to fail. It was probably too expensive in the long run. Maybe we should have tried animation.”

There are plenty of reasons why a movie, even one based on a famous franchise, can end up in the dreaded development hell. In 2011, four years after it was announced, The Sims movie was still in development. “One of my friends was approached to direct it,” Lynch says, but it’s unclear what happened after that.[It was] It’s kind of sad because it’s a fun idea. I think it was well executed and it’s based on a game that everyone knows, so I was excited about it.”

What does all this mean for Robbie’s Sims movie, which will be produced by her production company LuckyChap and directed by Loki’s Kate Herron? The Sims may not seem like it actually has a plot — Lynch doesn’t see it that way, and Wright envisioned it as an interactive dollhouse. But that shouldn’t be a problem for a production company that had a huge hit with the Barbie movie last year. “I’m a fan of everyone involved, so I’m really excited to see what they’ve created,” Lynch says.

And indeed, the four massive Sims games provide more than two decades’ worth of material, if you know where to look: recurring characters, expansion packs, complicated family trees, missing people, and aliens make up a vast multiverse of timelines and subplots. The disappearance of one of the games’ most famous characters, Bella Goth, occurred off-screen between The Sims and The Sims 2, and is one of the biggest mysteries in gaming history, worthy of a film adaptation in itself.

Now that the recent spate of good (and great) video game adaptations has lifted the video game movie curse, Lynch is interested in another installment of EA’s iconic game franchise. “I’ve talked to the guys at EA. [about] “SSX Tricky,” he says, “is a snowboarding game, but it has its own incredible personality, from the anime-like visuals to the amazing soundtrack.”

“I thought it might be something like ‘The Fast and the Furious’ but with some Scott Pilgrim-style snowboarding scenes and the greatest soundtrack of all time… Someone contact me. It could be a lot of fun.”