Why Was The Sims Movie Cancelled? Blame This Michael Fassbender's Box Office Flop

Summary:

• Disney acquired Fox in 2019 and immediately began fixing the studio's problems and changing its policies, resulting in the cancellation of dozens of potential projects.
• Among the canceled projects was an adaptation of The Sims, one of the most popular games in history, which was first released in 2000.
• The most likely reason for the cancellation of The Sims movie was the studio's previous failure to adapt the game – 2016's Assassin Creed, which became a commercial and critical flop.

In 2019, Disney acquired Fox, but at the same time it acquired not only the rights to mutant superheroes and several world-famous franchises such as Avatar, Alien and Planet of the Apes, but also a lot of headaches – mainly related to the financial problems of the acquired studio.

Disney Scrapped Numerous Fox Film Projects

Due to a number of failed Fox films, Disney decided to rethink its approach to producing films from that studio.

It turned out that there was a real mess in the planning and departments – and many projects that were in the early stages of development went under the knife. Unfortunately, some of them were very promising ones.

In the six months since the deal closed, Disney has scrapped or frozen several dozen projects, mostly those in the early stages of production. But even those films on which Fox had managed to spend some money were cold-bloodedly killed. In all, about $50 million went down the drain.

The Sims Movie Was Canceled Because of Assassin's Creed

And among those killed projects was, yes, a movie based on the game beloved by millions.

The Sims hit shelves in February 2000 and has since sold more than 11 million copies – ranking just below The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 13th place on the list of most profitable PC games, and this is just the first installment of the franchise, which has sold more than 200 million copies overall.

Most likely, The Sims adaptation was canceled due to Fox's previous similar experience, which failed miserably – the 2016 film adaptation of Assassin's Creed starring Michael Fassbender, which grossed only $240 million worldwide on a $125 million budget.

In short, the good director Justin Kurzel teamed up with the great actor Michael Fassbender to make a terrible adaptation of the good video game Assassin's Creed.

As in the original video game, the movie tells about an organization that sends people to the memory of their ancestors, where they try to find artifacts of antiquity, and at the same time, a global plot unfolds about the centuries-old confrontation between the orders of the Templars and the Assassins.

The main problem of the movie was the authors' attempt to make the movie as realistic as possible. This approach turned out to be a disaster – the viewers got a chaotic movie, weak acting, and minimal correspondence with the game universe.