[melanie]

Plotless game inspires Weird Science-esque plans

By Mike Smith

To put it mildly, the road from best-selling video game to box-office-smash movie is a somewhat rocky one. If you've had the misfortune of watching such "classics" as BloodRayne, Doom, or 1993's so-bad-it's-almost-good Super Mario Bros., you'll know what we mean.

All the same, the flood of game-to-movie crossovers shows no signs of abating. Out of the top five best-selling game franchises of all time, only two have yet to appear on the big screen -- and one of those, 100-million-selling The Sims, could well be about to make the leap.

But how do you turn a game with no plot, one that relies totally on user-created content and imagination, into a movie? We might be about to find out, because this consumer favorite was optioned by 20th Century Fox in 2007, and the planned movie's producer John Davis (I Robot, Predator) was quizzed this week by Collider.com about how he plans to tackle it.

SIMS 2 SCREENS

As Davis told Collider: "[In] The Sims, as you know, you can control your imaginary world, right? And our movie, a young man, a 16 year old kid ... and his friend get their hands on this thing called the Sims Infinity Pack ... this very strange video game store which was there just for that moment, and seemingly wasn't all that. But what they realize is that they can scan their world in, because this is the most life like, real Sims game ever. And as they are playing this they are all of a sudden realizing ... what they are playing on the game is having an effect on the real world. So in effect, through the game, they are able to control their world. It's wish fulfillment, and obviously it turns against them."

Collider compares Davis's plans to John Hughes nerd classic Weird Science, which is more than enough to pique our interest. But will the script be written in The Sims' gibberish language Simglish? If so, that's a job we'd love to tackle. How about it, Fox?

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Do you think it's going to work?