Tetris goes to the big screen, potential blockbuster?

I am not sure how many hours, nay, days of my life I have spent playing Tetris; a game so addictive it was invented to distract the Americans from the Russians during the Cold War (confirmation still pending on that last bit).

But even with my love of the game, it’s still surprising that Hollywood seemingly thinks that we all want it to hit the big screen. Apparently the Tetris Company is joining up with Threshold Entertainment to make the ‘heroine’ of games into a live-action-movie and to be honest I am not sure what to say. There really isn’t one movie that has been made from a game, in any genre, that has stood out as being brilliant, far from it in fact. The Super Mario Bros. movie of 1993 almost put me off Mario and the Doom movie, well, the less said the better. Now they want to make a puzzle game into a movie? I suppose it worked with the 2012 Battleship film right? Wrong.

In an interview with Speakeasy, Threshold CEO Larry Kasanoff (responsible for the Mortal Kombat movies that weren’t too bad) said:

 “It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie. This isn’t a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We’re not giving feet to the geometric shapes.”

Well thank goodness for that. Sadly other than a script in the works there is no other information on who will direct or who will star in the movie. One thing that Kasanoff says does make me slightly alarmed though

“Brands are the new stars of Hollywood. We have a story behind ‘Tetris’ which makes it a much more imaginative thing.”

Not sure what he means by ‘brands’ being the stars of Hollywood, but it does kinda sound like a cash in line or maybe that is just me. Personally I can’t really work out how they can put a movie together that has a decent script and pays homage to the actual game in any meaningful way. Can you?

Here’s a fan-made ‘teaser trailer’ for a possible interpretation of what a Tetris movie treatment could be…

 

Last Updated: October 1, 2014