Hollywood has spent the past few years proving that a video game with a big enough crowd can be dragged into a movie theater, and Disney has just found its next crowd in an unlikely place: Roblox. The studio’s 20th Century label has taken theatrical rights to 99 Nights in the Forest, one of the most-played titles on a platform better known for user-made worlds than for finished stories. The famous name attached to the deal will do most of the talking, but the transaction underneath it is simpler and colder. Disney is not buying a story here. It is buying an audience that already exists.

It is worth being precise about who is making what, because the shorthand has blurred it. Sam Raimi is producing, alongside his longtime partner Rob Tapert; he is not directing. The screenplay goes to Josh Cooley, an Oscar winner whose signature is animated comedy rather than dread, as The Hollywood Reporter noted when it reported his hiring. No director is attached, and no cast. What the project has, for now, is a brand on the marquee and a property with a built-in following — which, in the current market, a studio treats as most of the battle already won.

The thornier question is what a screenwriter is actually adapting. 99 Nights in the Forest is a survival game, not a narrative one. Its pull is a loop and a mood: search for four missing children and outlast the thing in the dark — a deer-shaped predator that cannot be killed and comes for players at nightfall. There is atmosphere and there is a monster. There is no plot, no protagonist, no arc waiting to be transcribed. Cooley’s job is to invent the film that the game only implies, which is a very different assignment from adapting a book or even a story-driven game.

The appeal to Disney is not mysterious. The game has drawn tens of billions of visits since its 2025 release and ranks among the most-played titles in Roblox history, with a peak concurrent audience most theatrical franchises would envy and a player rating north of ninety percent. That is a marketing base no original horror premise could buy. In a business that now green-lights on pre-existing reach, a title millions of young players already know by name is the safest kind of bet a studio can place.

It also marks a shift in where Hollywood shops. After Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy’s turned game brands into box-office events, studios went looking for the next one — and this time the source is not a polished studio release but a game made by a small New Zealand outfit, Grandma’s Favourite Games, and hosted on a user-generated platform. Roblox is a storefront of other people’s ideas. Mining it for a theatrical release is a new kind of move, and 99 Nights is the test case.

Which raises the contradiction nobody involved has resolved. Roblox’s core audience skews young; Raimi’s producing brand promises real horror; Cooley’s craft is family-friendly animation. Those three signals point at three different films. Is this a PG-13 creature feature built for the game’s teenagers, or the harder survival-horror the premise flatters? The answer decides whether the movie keeps the audience it was bought for. So far it is conspicuously absent.

The Deer, at least, has proven it can travel: it crossed into Fortnite as the first Roblox-born character in an official event there, a monster with more brand mobility than most studio IP. Whether it can carry a two-hour story — rather than a loop that resets every night — is the one thing the deal cannot buy in advance.

Tags: Sam Raimi, Roblox, video game movies, 99 Nights in the Forest, Josh Cooley