Margot Robbie is making a Sims movie, has apparently found her niche

Margot Robbie is apparently settling into her comfort zone—and that comfort zone is apparently situated somewhere smack dab in the middle of the Uncanny Valley—as THR reports that the Barbie star is set to follow-up her box-office smash hit movie about a fake woman learning to come to life by… producing a film adaptation of “fake people walk around, pretending to be alive” computer game sensation The Sims.

Robbie is set to produce the movie with her LuckyChap production company, which is currently riding high on the whole “produced one of the biggest movies of 2023" thing. She’s recruited Kate Herron, who’s best known for her work on the first season of Disney+’s Loki, to co-write and direct the movie, working with Vertigo Entertainment and Sims owners Electronic Arts.

And there’s a tendency, here, to go: Well what the hell would a Sims movie even be? The games are defined, after all, by being deliberately plotless: Your little computer people walk around, work jobs, eat dinner, use the bathroom, get in the swimming pool, find out the ladder into the swimming pool has been deleted by a cruel and capricious god, then drown and die. Repeat, until your mom notices what you’re doing, and tells you to go do your homework.

But that’s a very pre-Barbie—and, if we’re being honest, pre-Lego Movie—mindset. After all, the fact that The Sims contains no conventional narrative doesn’t mean it doesn’t have themes to explore—the mundanity of regular life, the constant need to keep your survival meters topped up, the inherent cosmic unreliability of ladders—and Robbie, specifically, has proven that she knows how to put together a team that can explore the conceptual space around a toy or game without having to make a straight 1 to 1 adaptation. Which leaves us in the weird position of being kind of into the idea of a Sims film adaptation—especially with a team like this.