No, really.
Of course, all this will really pay off in 2019 when we get ‘Tetris The Movie 2: Die Hard Origins’.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Threshold Entertainment has teamed up with The Tetris Company to develop a live-action adaptation of Alexey Pajitnov’s seminal tract on how to troll capitalist pig-dogs with fiendishly addictive shape-spinning puzzle gameplay, and dodgy rights management.
Threshold’s CEO Larry Kasanoff is quoted as saying, presumably with a straight face:
“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.”
That’s… good? Kasanoff, who is no stranger to video game movies having brought us 1995’s cheeseball classic Mortal Kombat and 1997’s ball of dickcheese Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, doesn’t stop there:
“Brands are the new stars of Hollywood. We have a story behind Tetris which makes it a much more imaginative thing… What you [will] see in Tetris is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance”
Not only does this fulfill what Black20 Studios notoriously predicted in their Tetris: The Movie parody trailer a few years back, Kasanoff’s meagre description almost sounds like he watched the thing and took it as a legitimate pitch. The ‘Brands are the new stars of Hollywood’ line is particularly cringeworthy, probably because it’s more true than any of us would want to admit especially in the face of a case of brand exploitation so ridiculous it’s almost satire-proof.
So, I suppose we should just cut to the chase and start speculating on which piece Benedict Cumberbatch is playing?
Thankfully, the filmmakers have announced their determination to stick with old-school practical effects.