Survival horror where killer rats take over New York in the works

A film about killer rats taking over New York City is in development from the studio behind The Hunger Games.

The untitled film will be directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, who helmed the 2015 horror-comedy The Final Girls as well as episodes of the American remake of The Inbetweeners. It will also be produced by Jason Fuch, co-creator and co-showrunner of Stephen King series It: Welcome to Derry.

Deadline has reported that the film will be distributed by Lionsgate, and the plot “will see New York City in a race against time to stop a killer rat infestation unlike anything the world has ever seen”.

The film will play on a very real association between the rodents and the city. New York has often been associated with a large rat population, with an urban myth saying that there are five times more rats than people. In reality, a 2023 survey estimated the five New York boroughs’ rat population to be around nearly three million, equivalent to almost a third of the city’s human population.

In 2015, the viral video Pizza Rat took the world by storm. The clip showed a rat determinedly dragging a full slice of pizza onto the New York underground. The scene became popular for its stereotypes of New York, and prompted a number of memes on social media.

In 2020, during the Coronavirus pandemic, an actor named Jonothon Lyons was spotted dressed as Pizza Rat, wearing a rat head mask and a brown jumpsuit, dragging a giant pizza around various locations in New York and posting videos under the pseudonym Buddy The Rat.

The performances became popular on TikTok and Lyons found fame, telling In The Know: “Buddy is thrilled about the attention. All he ever wanted to do is travel the world and make people smile and now thanks to the internet it seems he’s got the world smiling. I hope when people run into Buddy they feel a little bit brighter for a moment.”

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