Margot Robbie is producing a Sims movie from the director of Loki

There will be a movie based on The Sims, according to The Hollywood Reporter – and considering the people involved in its production and direction, it’s worth taking quite seriously.

The director is Kate Herron, who directed the entire first season Loki, which is perhaps the pinnacle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s television adventures: smart, slick and fun, with a strong visual identity. Herron will co-write the Sims movie with Briony Redman; The pair regularly work together and also wrote an episode of the upcoming new season of Doctor who.

The production company behind The Sims movie is even more important. LuckyChap, which Margot Robbie runs with her husband Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr. LuckyChap can take the lion’s share of the credit for Robbie’s big hit of $1.4 billion in 2023 Barbie (not to mention Emerald Fennell’s viral sensation Salt burn). It was the production company that was given the near-impossible task of turning the toy property into a good script by a credible director, Greta Gerwig, and then getting the whole improbable build approved by Mattel and financed by a major studio.

These skills are clearly relevant to making a movie of The Sims, which, like Barbie, has become wildly popular without the need for a defined story or even defined characters. LuckyChap will have help in this regard from co-producers Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment, who (along with a host of horror films) produced the similarly challenging Lego films, and will have a hand in the upcoming Minecraft film adaptation too.

Electronic Arts “will also play a creative and producing role,” according to THR, although the publisher can hopefully take a back seat and let its well-chosen partners cook.

But what are they going to cook? With The Sims, the sky’s the limit: Maxis’ life simulation games follow the lives of entire families and societies of Sims, from birth to death, in a range of scenarios from the stereotypical suburban to the fantastic, and tend to generate storylines that reminiscent of mild sitcom or soap opera to wild surrealism. The games seem ripe for exactly the kind of meta approach Gerwig has opted for Barbie. Will there be woohooing? Will it be entirely in Simlish with subtitles? We’ll have to wait to find out: the film doesn’t have a release date yet.