Will ‘Tetris’ filmmakers think outside the blocks?
BEIJING — It lacks the building blocks of characters and a plot for now, but a Chinese-American studio hopes to turn the “Tetris” video game into a blockbuster movie.
Threshold Global Studios is budgeting $80 million to strategically rotate, slide and drop the famed 1980s stacking game into a sci-fi thriller.
The project is the first for the studio, a newly formed joint venture between Chinese entertainment investor Bruno Wu’s Seven Star Works and producer Larry Kasanoff’s Threshold Entertainment Group, which produces live-action movies.
“For our debut project, Threshold Global Studios will bring one of the most beloved, cross-generational gaming brands in the world to the big screen as an epic, sci-fi thriller,” Kasanoff said in a statement.
The video game requires players to arrange and clear bricks that fall faster and faster into a rectangular matrix at the bottom of the screen before they run out of space. “Tetris” has survived the transition from desktop to console to smartphone better than most other popular video games from the 1980s, such as “Pac-Man.”
Whether it will survive the transition to the big screen is less clear.
