Grow a Garden is huge. As Ted pointed out earlier this year, it's a little hard to comprehend that a free to play idle gardening game for Roblox made in a couple days by a teenager is more popular than any game you've ever played in your entire life. But it's true. By reported concurrent player counts, Grow a Garden is bigger than PUBG ever was on Steam, by far. It's even bigger than Fortnite.
So, as Hollywood rushes to convert pretty much every game from Call of Duty to The Sims into beaucoup boxoffice bucks, I have some sad but not-unexpected news to deliver to the parents of all those Roblox-obsessed kiddies.
Sorry, folks: you're gonna be dragged to the theaters in about a year to sit through Grow a Garden, the movie. On the plus side, it'll get your kids to stop playing Grow a Garden the game for about 90 minutes. Silver lining?
Deadline reports that Story Kitchen, which produced the Sonic the Hedgehog films and is developing movies based on games like It Takes Two and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, is now developing a Grow a Garden feature adaptation.
"Grow a Garden is exactly the kind of imaginative, heartfelt world we love to adapt," said Story Kitchen co-founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence Goldberg. "An uplifting story-world rooted in play, creativity, and community."
Deadline was also told the movie would "invite audiences of all ages into a whimsical, emotional, and unexpectedly epic story about growth, friendship, and the magic that happens when you nurture something from the ground up."
I installed Roblox and played Grow a Garden myself for the first time this morning and look, I get it. I could easily spend hours buying seeds and growing veggies and selling them—which is why I'm uninstalling Roblox the very same morning I installed it for the first time.
But it's a little hard to picture Grow a Garden as a film, at least until you remember that A Minecraft Movie proved you can get pretty far (like almost a billion dollars far) by writing a script where someone like Jack Black just holds up various in-game items kids recognize while yelling the name of each item at the top of his lungs. I'm not sure what Grow a Garden's equivalent to a chicken jockey is, but I'm sure Story Kitchen can figure it out.
