A ‘Labubu’ Movie Is In the Works at Sony

Labubu. The Movie.

With the fuzzy, vaguely creepy dolls remaining hugely popular all around the globe, Sony has made a deal to develop a movie based on the property.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio “picked up the screen rights to the Chinese doll brand with the aim of making a movie and, in success, launching a franchise.”

They don’t have any details about a story or about the creators at this point, nor whether the film will be live-action or animated. (Sony’s animation studio is behind such major recent hits as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Kpop Demon Hunters.)

The little critters originated in China in the late 2010s, then bloomed into a full-blown pop culture fad in the last few years after they started being sold by the Chinese toy company Pop Mart, who offer the Labubus in blind boxes.

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Labubus would be far from the first toy brand to become a movie. In recent years, action figures and board games have become a whole subset of the blockbuster industrial complex. We’ve gotten films based on established toy brands like G.I. Joe, Transformers, Ouija, Battleship, American Girl dolls, Bratz, and Trolls. Oh, and there was also a little film based on Barbie dolls that grossed $1.4 billion all by itself. (Heard of it?)

In that film environment, obviously someone was going to try to make a Labubu movie. The only question left now is whether the project actually makes it all the way into production — and whether Labubus are still such a white-hot property by the time it is ready for wide release.