Culture

The Sims Coming to the Big Screen

by Jordan Yerman | May 25, 2007 at 07:52 am

1073 views | 5 Recommendations | 1 comment

No, not The Simpsons. The Sims.
When I think "video game-based movie", I think Resident Evil, or maybe even Doom. Or the still-in-preproduction Splinter Cell. I do not think of The Sims, in which the player controls avatars as they move through... day-to-day life. I find Fox's logic (outlined in the article below) to be flawed: old does not necessarily equal good. This deal does, though, illustrate the decisionmaking process behind studio productions: they run the numbers and do what the numbers tell them to do.

20th Century Fox has acquired feature rights to the life simulation computer game "The SIMS" from Electronic Arts, and has set project up with Fox-based John Davis.

The five-year-old franchise is the best selling PC game in history, with worldwide sales topping 85 million, bringing in over $1.6 billion. Pic will be a live-action version.

Steve Asbell is overseeing the project for Fox with SIMS Studio head Rod Humble managing the creative property for Electronic Arts. Brian Lynch will script; story is under wraps with talent yet to be named.

"'The SIMS has done an interactive version of an old story, which is what it's like to have infinite power and how do you deal with it," said Humble. "Given that that's an old story, you can imagine how easily that would translate to traditional story telling."

The theme of unilateral control over others has been explored in The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Bruce Almighty, and the upcoming Evan Almighty.