The most useful piece of script notes anyone has given the Stray movie came from a fan on Reddit, and it amounted to a single plea: give the cat its meows and nothing else. What made the game work, the argument ran, is that the animal at the center of it was never anything more than an ordinary cat.
That is it. That is the whole assignment. And there is a real chance the film fails it.
What’s happening
Stray, the rapturously reviewed and award-laden 2022 adventure game in which you play an orange tabby lost in a ruined underground city, is being adapted into an animated feature by Annapurna Animation.
The game was developed by BlueTwelve Studio and published by Annapurna’s interactive division, so this is a company adapting something it already had a hand in. Nick Bruno, who directed Nimona, is attached to direct, and Annapurna brought in Nimona producer Julie Zackary as head of animation production to oversee its animation output.
If you have not played it: the cat falls through a hole, lands in a ruined underground city, and finds its way around with an AI drone for company. Humanity is gone. Robots and mutant bugs are not. Somewhere between a stray-animal story and a post-collapse survival one.
Robert Baird, co-head of Annapurna Animation, has talked about the project in terms that suggest he knows what he is holding. His framing, in comments to Entertainment Weekly, is that the game interrogates what makes us human while containing not a single human being, and that what he is actually making is a buddy comedy between a cat and a robot. He has promised a “hopepunk” register, protagonists chasing a better world rather than wallowing in a ruined one, and has set the bar at making the definitive film in that mode.
Baird has also named the hard part without being asked. Much of the game’s appeal, in his reading, came from experiencing the world from inside an adorable animal, and the question he says the team keeps circling is how the game managed that at all, and how a film is supposed to reproduce it.
Why the talking-cat question is not a nitpick
Because the game’s entire emotional engine runs on the cat not being a person.
In Stray, you never learn what the cat thinks. You cannot. It meows, it nuzzles, it knocks things off shelves, and everything you feel about it, you supply yourself. That gap between the animal and your interpretation of the animal is not a limitation the developers worked around. It is the thing that makes the game land, and it is the thing every cat owner recognizes, because it is the exact relationship you have with the animal on your couch.
The moment the cat has an internal monologue, that gap closes. It stops being a cat and becomes a small person in fur, which is a genre with roughly ten thousand entries already.
And the pressure to close it will be enormous, because a mute protagonist is a nightmare for a screenwriter. Games have ten to fifteen hours and a player who is doing things. A film has ninety minutes and an audience sitting still. The temptation to hand the cat a voice, or to route all the exposition through a chatty robot sidekick, will be structural rather than malicious.
Which is why the other fan note that surfaced in the coverage is almost as sharp as the first. The one thing that commenter wanted from an adaptation was to see the cat reunited with other cats. Even the wish list is about animal behavior, not plot.
The commercial context, which is the worrying part
There is enormous pressure on this to land, and the reason is The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which grossed more than $1.35 billion worldwide.
That is the number sitting in the room during every creative conversation about a video game adaptation right now, and it exerts a gravitational pull toward the safe, loud, celebrity-voiced version of things. The Mario film is not a film that trusted silence.
Annapurna’s own track record cuts the other way, for what it is worth. The company’s animation division launched with Nimona, the acclaimed shape-shifter story that Netflix picked up, and Annapurna Pictures made its name on films like Vice and Hustlers, which are not the output of a studio allergic to risk.
So it could go either way, and the fans know it, and that is why the discourse around this adaptation has been unusually specific about the failure mode.
What a cat person should actually want from it
Beyond the dialogue question, the thing to hope for is that the film keeps the behavior.
The reason real cats reportedly sat and watched the game is that the animal in it moves correctly. It stalks, it hesitates, it launches at things, it wanders off mid-task because something else became more interesting. It goes high when it is nervous. It carries its tail up when it is comfortable, which is the single most reliable friendly signal a cat gives and one most owners never learn to read.
An animated film could preserve that beautifully. Animation is arguably better suited to it than a game, because an animator can nail the weight and the hesitation and the exact moment a cat decides to leap.
Or it could give the cat human facial expressions, human timing, and a wisecrack, and the whole thing evaporates.
What’s new since this was written
As of now, the film remains in development, with no release date announced, and no confirmation of whether it will land in theaters or on a streamer first.
That is worth stating plainly, because the internet is full of confident claims about this movie’s release date, its box office, and its reviews, and they are fabrications. Fan wikis, particularly the ones explicitly built for invented concepts, have generated detailed and entirely fictional entries for a Stray film complete with premiere dates and grosses, and those entries get scraped, repeated, and passed along until they look like reporting.
They are not. The confirmed facts remain narrow: Annapurna Animation is making it, Nick Bruno is directing, Julie Zackary is producing, and nobody has said when you will see it.
Which is, in a way, a fitting situation for a property about a small animal wandering through a landscape of unreliable machines.
The bottom line
Annapurna has the rights, the director, and a genuine understanding of why the game worked, which is more than most adaptations start with.
Now they have to resist the one thing every instinct in the industry will push them toward. Let the robot talk. Let the drone be funny. Let the world be strange and hopeful and full of junk.
Just don’t let the cat talk.
References
- Baird, R., and Millstein, A., interviews with Entertainment Weekly, 2023.
- Animation World Network. “‘Stray’ animated feature in development at Annapurna.”
- The Hollywood Reporter. “Annapurna Animation expands with ‘Nimona’ team; unwraps two features.”
- Kotaku. “Stray, that cute cat game from last year, is getting an animated movie.”
- Variety, box office reporting on The Super Mario Bros. Movie, 2023.
