This Tetris news is about as puzzling as the game itself.
Tetris will be made into a feature-length movie, according to The Wall Street Journal. Threshold Entertainment is teaming up with the Tetris Company to turn the beloved block-shifting puzzle game from the '80s into "a very big, epic sci-fi movie," Threshold's CEO Larry Kasanoff told The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog.
"This isn't a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We're not giving feet to the geometric shapes," he said.
Although the film's director and cast haven't been determined yet, clearly the producers have a story already in mind for Tetris' big-screen debut. I'm sure Threshold will find some way to breathe life into this geometric game (there's always a way), but with no actual characters other than blocks featured in Tetris, I have no idea how they're actually going to pull this one off. Will they turn the different-shaped blocks into spaceships that fly around the galaxy? Or maybe configuring the classic Tetris blocks to fit perfectly together will unlock some big secret or save the universe or something. We can only hope that it turns out to be more exciting than how the idea for the film currently sounds on paper.
However, if there was any production company to take the helm of the movie version of Tetris, there may be no one better than Threshold, who is most famous for adapting the Mortal Kombat games into two films in 1995 and 1997, respectively. Mortal Kombat is actually a pretty epic movie, so if the Tetris film adaptation comes anywhere close to the glory of the "IT HAS BEGUN" scene, I am totally on board.
Believe it or not, video games actually provide the source material for many films. But that doesn't mean they always make the best films. For every Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time that makes bank at the box office, there's a Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon and Doom that doesn't live up to expectations.
Still, that won't stop people from turning Tetris and other video games into movies. World of Warcraft, Assassin's Creed and Angry Birds are all set for their own big-screen adaptations in the near future. You better be game.
