Baobab Studios Acquires Roblox Game Rights for Films and TV Series

Every visit to Natural Disaster Survival, every attempt at Barry's Prison Run, every hour logged inside Deepwoken's dark fantasy lore was quietly compiling a pitch deck. Nobody playing those games knew an Emmy-winning animation studio was watching the retention metrics.

Baobab Studios, the Redwood City-based company co-founded by Madagascar director Eric Darnell and former Zynga VP of games Maureen Fan, announced on March 26 that it had acquired exclusive film and television rights to all three Roblox titles for development as animated feature films and series. The combined visit count across the slate sits at nearly 10 billion, and Baobab, which counts Disney and Comcast among its backers, now holds the keys to some of the platform's most durable IP.

The selection logic is the most revealing part of the deal. Baobab explicitly bypassed trending titles in favor of games with long-term staying power. Fan, who serves as CEO, said the studio "sought titles that combine reach with retention, deepen engagement, and clear world-building that can carry powerfully into film and television." That framing matters because Baobab has built its own Roblox experiences, giving the studio a firsthand read on what actually holds players versus what inflates visit counts for a week and disappears.

The three games represent distinct tonal registers. Natural Disaster Survival, created by Luke Weber (Roblox handle: Stickmasterluke) in 2008, is the platform's elder statesman: a physics-driven environmental chaos simulator that has outlasted nearly two decades of platform evolution to reach 4.1 billion visits. Its premise, survivors scrambling through procedurally triggered catastrophes, is a natural fit for an animated ensemble. Barry's Prison Run, the first-person obby built by Osian Taubman-Edwards (PlatinumFalls), occupies horror-comedy territory: players escape the antagonist Barry and eliminate him at the finish line. Taubman-Edwards said he had "always envisioned Barry's Prison Run as more than a game, with a story and character that unfold more deeply over time."

The deepest narrative asset in the slate is Deepwoken. Monad Studios, headed by creators Ragoozer and Arch_Mage, released it in December 2021 as a paid-access dark fantasy action RPG that has since become Roblox's most successful paid-access title, logging nearly 1.5 billion visits and more than 50 billion minutes of engagement. Its elaborate lore has already generated sprawling fan communities across YouTube, Reddit, and Discord, meaning the IP arrives with an audience already primed for long-form storytelling. Ragoozer and Arch_Mage said they were "thrilled for our fans to see its stories told in a wholly new medium."

The deal structure carries implications beyond these three titles. Baobab positioned each acquisition as a genuine collaboration rather than an outright rights transfer, with the original creators actively involved in the adaptation process. That framing stands apart from older UGC licensing arrangements where platform creators signed away IP and watched someone else build the franchise without them. Financial terms were not disclosed, which leaves the question of creator compensation unanswered for the broader community tracking this model.

What Baobab has formalized here is a structured pipeline from Roblox's user-generated ecosystem directly into linear media development. If any one of these adaptations gains traction, the template will be copied quickly, and the next generation of Roblox creators will start building games with a very different ceiling in mind.