Just when you thought there were no more viable brand names for Hollywood to exploit, The Wall Street Journal scored some bonus points by reporting that a movie based on the classic video game “Tetris” is game-on for Threshold Entertainment. And no, it will not just be big blocky geometric objects falling and rotating for two hours.
“It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie,” Threshold’s CEO Larry Kasanoff said.”This isn’t a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We’re not giving feet to the geometric shapes.”
Kasanoff already earned video game cache as the producer behind both 1995’s Mortal Kombat film and its sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, while Threshold as a company is best known for several LEGO specials as well as theme park attractions. Kasanoff is hoping that name-recognition value of “Tetris” will translate not only to big screen success but to potential theme park experiences and other ancillary media.
“Brands are the new stars of Hollywood,” Kasanoff says. “We have a story behind Tetris which makes it a much more imaginative thing. We certainly have the canvas for location-based entertainment based on the epicness. What you [will] see in ‘Tetris’ is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance.”
Created by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, “Tetris” became a video game phenomenon after it became a fixture of the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989. The puzzling gameplay involving multi-colored Tetriminos set to the traditional Russian folk tune “Korobeiniki” has to this day sold 70 million physical copies and 100 million copies for cell phones, earning its place as the highest paid-downloaded game of all time.
