Three words. Tetris. The movie.

Sometimes words simply don’t suffice. If you like movies and you also like ancient – yet highly popular – arcade, desktop or hand held video games, the Wall Street Journal has the story to set your feet to dancing. They’re making a movie out of Tetris.

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A film adaptation of the classic ‘80s video game “Tetris” will be falling into theaters sometime in the near future.

Threshold Entertainment has teamed up with the Tetris Company to develop a live-action film based on the game. While no directors or cast are attached to the film yet, there is a story in place.

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

On the one hand, I suppose I can see how you could build a script around Tetris, though not derived from the actual game play. I’m picturing something where the game is adapted to some technology which generates some sort of wormhole to another dimension, or… okay. I got nothing.

Traditionally we see this sort of development go in the other direction. A blockbuster movie comes out in some sort of action, thriller or science fiction genre and then a video game is put out based on that story. With very few exceptions these games tend to be unplayable disasters. Movie studios simply don’t have the time, resources or, frankly, the interest to do this right. The games all too often wind up looking like a different game model with new faces pasted on the characters using off the shelf game engines. The studios can’t invest the same level of effort that shops like Rockstar and Electronic Arts put into really innovative, successful games.

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Far fewer are the examples of the model moving the opposite way, where a hit movie comes out of a successful game franchise. The glaring, obvious exception is Tomb Raider, but it’s difficult to say if that franchise would have taken off at all had they not snagged Angelina Jolie to play the role of the heroine. I’ve heard some folks argue that the TRON movies were a success, but honestly I’ve never thought they were that great. (Let the hate begin in the comments.) Others – and I’m not going to go pointing fingers here – have just failed spectacularly.

With all of that said, will I watch the movie? Of course I will. I love Tetris. And then I’ll go home disappointed and write a horrible review of it here.

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