The Next Exciting Game Adaptation Could Redeem Its Most Annoying Character

Sydney Sweeney is jumping on the biggest trend in entertainment and looking to bring a hit game to the big screen. Even though she’s made her debut as the love-sick, insecure Cassie of Euphoria, and bleeding heart liberal with a mouth full of daggers in White Lotus, Sweeney’s likely set for a much more loving and kind role in the video game to film adaptation of Split Fiction — at least if you take our educated guess.

While Vulture reports that we don’t officially know what role Sweeney is cast for yet, fans of the game will likely be able to hazard a clue. The two female protagonists of Split Fiction are wise-cracking city slicker Mio, who’s a woman of color with brown hair and eyes, and Zoe, a blonde woman from the countryside imbued with endless optimism. Our bet is on Sweeney being cast as Zoe.

Split Fiction came out only last month, but it has been a major critical and commercial success. The co-op game follows Mio and Zoe, two young, aspiring fiction writers looking for their big break. When Rader Publishing invites these characters to take part in a top secret test run for a new technology that places authors in their own stories, they arrive hoping their participation will jump start their careers. Mio’s last-minute reluctance to take part ends with her accidentally entering Zoe’s pod. With the two now experiencing each other’s work intimately, they get a first-hand account of the other’s inspirations, fears, and anxieties. Along the way, they uncover the nefarious intentions behind Rader’s new technology.

So who will play Sweeney’s counterpart, playing Freaky Friday to Zoe (or, if we’re wrong, Mio). How about Zendaya? Maybe Rachel Zegler? We’ll no doubt find out soon enough.

What we do know is that Jon M. Chu (Wicked, Crazy Rich Asians) is directing while Deadpool & Wolverine screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese are on board for the script. With this kind of team assembled, in terms of vibes, we can probably expect a Hollywood blockbuster, filled to the gills with fast-paced action, witty buddy cop humor, and spinning dutch angles. That’s certainly topical and trendy, riding off of the high from Minecraft smashing box offices for over $720 million recently.

While thrilling, it’s not exactly surprising that Split Fiction is getting fast-tracked for Hollywood treatment. After all, the game’s creator, Josef Fares, left the film industry to make games. Sure, Fares has described his conversations with Hollywood in often critical terms ( “There’s so much bullsh*t, let’s be honest,” he told Inverse, for example. “There’s a lot of talk, blah, blah, blah,”). But he is one of 2025’s great storytellers, even if his preference today is to tell tales in video games.

One thing about Zoe, the character we are betting Sweeney will play, is that she is complex. For starters, she can be a little, well, much. When I confessed I found the character quite annoying in the early hours of the game, Fares told me she tends to grow on people.

“She’s super charming,” Fares said, “I really like her because she’s optimistic and sees life in a good way.”

Endless, starry-eyed optimism isn’t really much like Sweeney’s past roles, but that’s what makes this casting decision such an interesting choice.