For the past few years, it seems like movies based on games — ones that you wouldn't necessarily think were obvious adaptations for the big screen — have been all the rage. No, not RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons (or rather, Dungeons and Dragons) and narrative-based video games, both of which have been the inspiration for fantasy and sci-fi blockbusters for years, but actual, flat-out board games and everything of that ilk.
From the critical flop Battleship (which, as a plus, featured Rihanna in her first acting role, as well as a post-Friday Night Lights, coif-shorn Taylor Kitsch) to an untitled project based on Monopoly that was greenlit this past July, to the arcade-inspired (and box office poison) Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels.
Unfortunately, many of these movies have been negatively received, so when a movie based on the classic handheld gem Tetris was announced this past September, the reaction was more than a bit dubious (especially when the phrases used to describe the movie were "a very big, epic sci-fi movie" with "intergalactic significance"). So, who would have imagined that there would be two in the works?
The second Tetris project, which was announced on Nov. 18, will have X-Men director Brett Ratner at the helm as producer — but this one will take a different tack than a more standard, straightforward adaptation. Instead, Ratner's movie will be a historical behind-the-scenes look as to how the tetronimoes-filled game was made.
To be fair, the story behind the making of Tetris is ripe for the telling: a tale of one man's creation in the iron grip of the former Soviet Union during the last thralls of the country's stifling communist rule. Created and developed by artificial intelligence researcher Alexey Pajitnov in 1980, the game was bounced between colleagues before being released in Moscow, where it became an underground phenomenon, which led to eventual global acclaim. However, a dispute over licensing rights between publishers — and the very real threat of potential punitive measures from the Soviet regime — could potentially make Ratner's Tetris movie the next Social Network.
As for the "blockbuster" sci-fi adaptation of Tetris? Since it was first declared, there has been no word on any forward movement for the script. Threshold Entertainment CEO Larry Krasnoff described the floating project as "[not] a movie with a bunch of lines running around the page. We're not giving feet to the geometric shapes. What you see in Tetris is the teeny tip of an iceberg."
Via: Wired UK
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