Yes, they're going to squeeze out a feature film based on a Soviet era computer game where all you do is stack blocks.
Why do they want to do that?
Well, the knee jerk sarcastic reaction is that Hollywood hates the world, god wants to punish the planet, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But there are actually a logical, at least by Hollywood standards, reasons for this decision.
Those reasons are:
1. Hollywood is terrified of anything original because they are convinced that "original" equates risk.
2. Tetris, while having no narrative, characters, or anything other than the act of stacking blocks, is a familiar "brand." Because when you're trying to avoid originality, but are running low on movies and TV shows to remake, you need a familiar "brand" to take the place of a story.
3. The producer, Threshold Entertainment, is convinced that a movie based on what is essentially a toy or game will sell because of:
The Lego Movie garnered critical acclaim and mucho bucks when it came out, and the folks at Threshold think that people flocked to the theatre to see their favourite brand on the big screen.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
That might be what this company is telling their investors, but I can assure anyone with half a brain cell that their theory is way off.
My evidence?
If it was true then Food Fight, Threshold Entertainment's animated movie featuring an all-star cast of corporate brand mascots wouldn't have involved 10 years of struggle and millions upon millions of dollars spent to get made, only to vanish into straight to DVD oblivion, losing just about every penny invested in it.
Now, let's take a moment to explain why the Lego Movie was a hit.
First: It had very little to do with Lego.
Yep.
Lego was an excuse, but it was not a cause of the film, or its success.
Lego was the medium to bring together all sorts of characters from the Warner Brothers/Hasbro media arsenal and put them into funny situations together. It could have been made without Lego, and just about any other excuse to mash them all up together.
The Lego Movie was definitely not this:
If I was a big money fat cat with money to burn and asked to pitch in money for a Tetris movie, I would pass, unless I was looking for a big tax loss.
That's what I think, let me know what you think in the comments.
I saw this over a week ago. I assumed the article I read was a joke. You're saying this is real?
ReplyDeleteFuloydo-
ReplyDeleteIt's in development. So the odds are pretty good that nothing will come out of it but the producer being able to tell investors that he has a "brand name" on his development slate for a while.
The most interesting/horrifying/stupefying thing is the bizarre regurgitation happening between popular media. Uncharted is essentially a video game take on Indiana Jones - with many of the original cliches intact - and now its in development to be spit back out as a movie. Resident Evil was a video game knock-off of the Living Dead movies (which might explain why the movie adaptations went in a completely different direction), and Metal Gear is a Japanese take on James Bond (down to even spoofing the intro credits in the third game installment). Bioshock is a hack-job of Atlas Shrugged (albeit with the socialists as the good guys); Halo is Starship Troopers meets Aliens with kid-friendly xenomorphs. Video games used to be playable versions of our favorite movies, and now movies are unplayable versions of 3rd generation copies of stories we used to love.
ReplyDeleteBravo.
Hey, a tetris movie could theoretically do as well as the Battleship movie. That "only" cost 200 mill, and made back easily a third of its investment.
ReplyDeleteSandy