Sonic movies’ producer to turn Roblox’s biggest hit into a film
Story Kitchen is sowing the seeds of a big-screen expansion for the record-busting family-friendly game Grow a Garden.
Grow a Garden is the latest Roblox-born IP with a big-screen expansion plan in the works.
LA-based Story Kitchen (Sonic the Hedgehog) is developing a feature adaptation of the popular farming-themed game that it will produce with Think Influence, which reps the game’s creators. (Original developer BMWLux co-owns it with Splitting Point Studios.)
“Popular on Roblox” may be putting it lightly—Grow a Garden is the platform’s biggest game right now. Since launching back in March, it has racked up a whopping 33 billion plays. And the game broke a world record for most concurrent players when it hit a peak of 22.3 million on August 23. (That’s well ahead of previous record-holder Fortnite‘s 15.3 million.)
Designed for all ages, Grow a Garden revolves around tending a virtual patch of land, where players can grow and harvest crops to sell and then reinvest their earnings in rarer and more exotic seeds. The game’s massive appeal has been attributed to everything from its gentle tone to its old-school Roblox visuals.
Story Kitchen isn’t ready to share plot details yet, but the studio has teased the film as “a whimsical, emotional and unexpectedly epic story about growth, friendship and the magic that happens when you nurture something from the ground up.” Like its source material, the movie will also target an all-ages audience.
Dmitri Johnson, Michael Lawrence Goldberg and Timothy Stevenson are producing the film on behalf of Story Kitchen, along with JB Pictures’ Jeremy Bolt. John Gaudiosi and John Benyamine at Moonrock are co-producing with Story Kitchen’s Elena Sandoval.
Considering Gen Alpha’s deep love of platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, it’s no surprise that studios are increasingly starting to draw inspiration from these worlds to satisfy their moviegoing appetite. Most recently, Canada’s Wind Sun Sky Entertainment announced that it’s adapting another Roblox game, Jailbreak, into an animated feature film.