Josh Cooley to write live-action 99 Nights in the Forest for 20th Century Studios
20th Century Studios has hired Oscar winner Josh Cooley to write a live-action film based on 99 Nights in the Forest for cinemas.
Live action means real actors on real sets, rather than animation. The project is the studio's first feature adaptation of a video game, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The game comes from Grandma's Favourite Games and is played on Roblox, the online platform where users play and build games. It is an action-survival story in which players try to last 99 nights in a haunted forest, rescue four lost children and fight off creatures in the woods.
The numbers are large. Introduced in 2025, it ranked as the seventh-most-played game of all time on Roblox as of spring, with nearly 26 billion lifetime visits and a 90.6 percent player rating, per 20th Century Studios.
The studio heard pitches from several writers over the summer and chose Cooley's take. It landed the theatrical film rights in what Deadline described as a highly competitive situation. J.R. Young is overseeing the film for 20th Century Studios, with Michelle Kamme credited with getting the deal across the finish line.
Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are attached as producers for Ghost House Pictures, their horror label. The game's three creators, Alec Kieft, Matthew Hufton and Cameron Angland, will serve as executive producers alongside Romel Adam and Jose Cañas. Executive producers hold a senior credit, often with a creative or business role but without day-to-day control of the shoot.
No director is attached yet. That decision, plus casting and a release date, will come later.
Cooley is best known for animation. He co-wrote Pixar's Inside Out, which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay in 2016. He then won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2020 for Toy Story 4, his feature directorial debut. His other Pixar credits include Coco, Incredibles 2, Onward and Soul.
He also directed Transformers One, the first fully CG-animated Transformers film, which grossed more than $129 million worldwide, according to Deadline. In the game, Kieft was designer, known to players as Cracky4, Hufton was programmer, known as ForyxeV, and Angland created environments and assets, known as Viridial.
For fans, this means a familiar survival loop is heading for a new format. The game is about lasting through the night. The film will have to find its own way to tell that story with actors on screen.
