Josh Cooley is trading the toy box for something considerably more sinister. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Toy Story 4 has signed on to write a feature adaptation of 99 Nights in the Forest for 20th Century Studios, MovieBuzz News has confirmed. The project, based on the hit survival video game, is being developed as an action-adventure-horror hybrid - a genre cocktail that suggests audiences should brace for something far removed from the sunny, feel-good vibes of Cooley's animated resume.
Details remain scarce at this early stage. The studio has yet to announce a director, cast, or release window, and the plot is officially listed as TBA. But the source material alone is enough to raise eyebrows - and maybe a few heart rates.
What Exactly Is '99 Nights in the Forest'?
For the uninitiated, the game drops players into a haunted forest with one towering objective: survive 99 nights while attempting to rescue four lost children. Standing in the way are vicious deer - yes, deer - along with a host of other beasts that turn the great outdoors into a full-blown nightmare. Think less Bambi and more Bambi if Bambi had fangs, a grudge, and zero interest in making friends.
The setup is a pressure cooker by design. Every night survived inches players closer to the goal, but the forest itself seems determined to make sure nobody makes it to morning. Translating that slow-burn dread and resource-management tension to the big screen is no small feat, which makes Cooley's involvement all the more intriguing.
Why Josh Cooley?
On paper, the pairing seems like a curveball. Cooley made his directorial debut with Toy Story 4, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and raked in more than a billion dollars worldwide. Before that, he built a reputation as a sharp, character-driven storyteller at Pixar, penning Inside Out and directing the charming Riley's First Date? short.
But dig a little deeper and the hire makes a strange kind of sense. Cooley's animated work has never shied away from darker emotional territory - Toy Story 4 grappled with existential dread, abandonment, and the quiet terror of losing purpose. A haunted forest full of predatory wildlife is a different kind of scary, sure, but the underlying craft - building tension, earning scares, making audiences care about who lives and who doesn't - travels well across genres.
Writing duties are where Cooley starts here. Whether he eventually steps behind the camera remains an open question, but studios don't typically hand a writer the keys to a franchise-starter without at least considering them for the director's chair.
The Video Game Movie Gold Rush Continues
Timing-wise, this announcement lands squarely in the middle of Hollywood's ongoing love affair with video game IP. The past few years have seen game adaptations shed their long-standing reputation as cursed projects, with the right properties now viewed as legitimate tentpole material rather than quick cash grabs. Studios have watched audiences turn out in force for game-based stories, and 20th Century Studios clearly wants a seat at that table.
99 Nights in the Forest offers something a little different from the usual franchise fare, though. It's not a nostalgia play with decades of built-in fan service - it's a relatively fresh property with a premise that reads like a campfire story gone wrong. That could be a blessing. Less canon to honor means more room to build something cinematic, and horror is a genre where original scares still sell tickets.
There's also the small matter of that title. Ninety-nine nights is a lot of nights, and a film adaptation will have to decide whether to compress the timeline, montage through the ordeal, or find another way to capture the relentless grind of survival. It's the kind of structural puzzle that could make or break the adaptation - and exactly the sort of thing a writer with Cooley's instincts might relish solving.
What We Still Don't Know
Plenty, as it turns out. No cast has been attached, no director named, and no release date penciled in. The project doesn't even have a rating yet, though given the source material's emphasis on predatory beasts and general woodland menace, a scarier tone seems all but guaranteed.
For now, 99 Nights in the Forest sits in the early-development phase - the part of the movie lifecycle where everything is possible and nothing is confirmed. But the pieces on the board are interesting: a proven storyteller, a buzzy game property, and a studio eager to jump into the survival-horror sandbox.
Cooley, for his part, has spent his career finding heart in unlikely places. A haunted forest stalked by murderous deer is about as unlikely as it gets. If anyone can figure out how to make audiences root for survival against a herd of nightmare-fuel ungulates, it might just be him.
Keep it locked on MovieBuzz News for casting updates, director news, and everything else as 99 Nights in the Forest claws its way toward production.
Source: hollywoodreporter.com