(Credit: Alamy)

Sydney Sweeney has signed up to produce and star in a new movie from an Oscar-winning screenwriter based on a Reddit short story by a high school English teacher.

Four years ago, Joe Cote, a Massachusetts-based teacher, posted a twisted tale on the ‘no sleep’ subreddit titled “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family”. The short story centred on a woman who arrives on a family’s doorstep ten years after their 18-year-old daughter disappeared. She pretends to be the missing woman for one night—just long enough to steal as many of their valuables as possible.

Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to the viral story in a bidding war, and when Sweeney became involved, she brought screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Killers of the Flower Moon) with her. No director has been attached to the project yet.

It’s the latest landmark in Sweeney’s career, which has been rapidly ascending ever since she starred in HBO’s The White Lotus and Euphoria. In 2023, she broke out as a movie star with her lead turn opposite Glen Powell in Anyone But You, and she also used her burgeoning cache in Hollywood to produce and star in the horror film Immaculate.

Sweeney has a lot on her plate in the near future, too. She recently finished production on Paul Feig’s The Housemaid and David Michôd’s untitled biopic of boxer Christy Martin. In the summer of 2025, she will begin shooting Scandalous!, which is about  Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr’s secret love affair. She also has Lionsgate’s Americana, Amazon Prime Video’s Eden, and AppleTV+’s Echo Valley lined up for release.

As for Cote, it’s been an incredibly unlikely success story from the start. The educator was contacted out of the blue by manager Aaron Folbe of Underground Entertainment, who simply happened to discover the Reddit story and was so impressed by it that he wanted to meet its writer. Only a few years later, he got Hollywood representation and was an executive producing a major motion picture based on his story.