March 3, 2023, 11:54am
Bad Robot has snagged the film rights to Mona Awad’s bestselling 2019 novel Bunny—a bloody satire of elite MFA programs that became a BookTok sensation after a Bunny movie fan-casting hashtag went viral.
How viral? Somewhere in the region of 4.1 billion views.
Bunny, now in its fourteenth printing, follows follows Samantha Heather Mackey, a scholarship student at a small New England creative writing program who becomes embroiled in the saccharine-but-sinister world of a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny” and seem to move and speak as one.
As reported by Deadline yesterday:
BookTok has become a new go-to for studios and producers to find that next big piece of IP, especially given how loyal readers can be to certain novels. Sony recently announced that Blake Lively would be starring in its adaptation of It Ends With Us, another huge title on BookTok, and the news became one of the biggest trending stories on social media. Bad Robot hopes for similar excitement as the Bunny project comes together.
For authors looking to replicate Awad and Coleen Hoover’s BookTok success, here’s how to do it.