I have been waiting for someone to do something truly unhinged and brilliant with Bunny since I first read it, and the news that Bad Robot is bringing it to the big screen has me completely convinced it’s in the right hands.
Following a competitive bidding process, Bad Robot has acquired the rights to adapt Mona Awad’s bestselling novel Bunny into a feature film.
The novel gained a loyal fan base after blowing up on BookTok and is currently in its 14th printing, spurred by TikTok videos that have garnered more than 4.1 billion views following a Bunny movie fan-casting hashtag that went viral.
This book has been the internet’s obsession, and now it’s officially becoming a movie!
What Exactly Is The Novel Bunny About?
Bunny is genuinely one of the strangest, most captivating novels I have ever read, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
Bunny is a black comedy campus novel by Mona Awad, published in 2019. The story follows Samantha, a creative writing student at a prestigious New England university who is slowly drawn into a tight-knit quartet of friends nicknamed “the Bunnies.”
If you haven’t read the book yet, here’s the official synopsis to give you an idea of what to expect from the film adaptation:
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort—a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door—ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process.
As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
Why This Book Is So Hard to Put Down?
The genius of Bunny is that it refuses to be just one thing. It is satire. It is a horror. It is a fairy tale. It is a razor-sharp skewering of the MFA world and performative literary culture. And somehow, impossibly, it is also deeply funny.
Awad drew inspiration from movies such as Heathers, Carrie, The Craft, and Mean Girls when writing the novel. You can feel all those influences in the book’s DNA, but Bunny transcends them into something wholly its own.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, described Bunny as a form of Gothic satire—“very funny, kind of horrifying and quite far outside the lines.” If that isn’t an endorsement that makes you want to pick it up immediately, I don’t know what will.
Bunny was on lists of the best books of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and the New York Public Library.
The BookTok Phenomenon!
The story of how Bunny went from cult favorite to Hollywood bidding war is a remarkable one, and it’s almost entirely thanks to readers online.
The book about a gaggle of rich girls who dabble in magic and an outsider who gets sucked into their world of dark academia proved wildly popular with the BookTok crowd, leading Hollywood into a bidding war for the rights.
AMC had previously snapped up the television rights, but Bad Robot has now optioned Awad’s novel for a big-screen adaptation. The fact that it went through a competitive bidding process tells you everything about how seriously Hollywood is taking this IP.
Who Is Bad Robot and Why Should You Care?
For those unfamiliar, Bad Robot is J.J. Abrams’ production company, and its track record speaks for itself.
Bad Robot has produced many popular feature-length films, including Cloverfield, Star Trek, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, and Star Wars Episodes VII and IX.
These are not small productions. Bad Robot understands how to build tension, atmosphere, and spectacle, all of which Bunny demands in abundance.
The surrealist horror elements, the dark collegiate aesthetic, the sheer visual weirdness of the novel’s climax—this is a production company that can handle all of it.
The Bunny Universe Just Got Bigger
Here’s some very exciting news for fans of the original novel: the Bunny universe has already expanded on the page, which means the film could be the beginning of something much larger.
A sequel, titled We Love You, Bunny, was published on September 23, 2025.
In We Love You, Bunny, Sam is now a published author on tour for her first novel. When she stops in New England, she’s greeted by her former frenemies. This sequel tells their side of the story, from how they first formed the Smut Salon to the secrets of how the Bunnies truly gained their creative powers.
The book serves as a prequel, a sequel, and a standalone journey into the bizarre Bunny hive-mind. Publishers Weekly praised it for its “acerbic wit and satiric plotlines” and called it “bold satire” that “breaks exciting new ground in the Bunny universe.”
Casting and Release Date
As of now, no director has been officially confirmed, and no cast has been announced. The project is still in its early stages of development at Bad Robot.
There’s no production start date, and no talent has signed on to develop this twisted tale into its feature film adaptation yet. Given where the project currently stands, a release date before 2027 or 2028 seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, this one is bound to be extraordinary. We can’t wait!
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