“Brands are the new stars of Hollywood", so says Threshold Entertainment CEO Larry Kasanoff to the Wall Street Journal, and it's hard to argue with him. When audiences see a commercial for the next Captain America or Guardians of the Galaxy movie, they show up because "Marvel" brings with it a certain notoriety and expectation of quality. Lately we've seen Hollywood take to building franchises based on popular board and video games, and now one of the most iconic puzzle games of the '80s is getting its own movie.
Threshold Entertainment is piecing together a feature film based on the classic Tetris video game, y'know, the one with all of the falling blocks. The live-action movie is apparently very early on in development as no talent is attached, but Kasanoff says that a storyline is already in place.
Kasanoff: "We have a story behind ‘Tetris’ which makes it a much more imaginative thing....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."
It's not Kasanoff's first rodeo, either, as he helped bring the violent fighting game Mortal Kombat to the screen in 1997. The company has worked with Marvel and Lego in the animation field and it wouldn't be surprising to see them take a similar route as The Lego Movie, creating a story inside a Tetris-based world. Tetris debuted in 1984 originally created by Soviet game designer Pajitnov, and it became so popular that is has been on practically every gaming platform in existence. If the movie turns out to be just as much of a hit, Kasanoff plans on going much bigger, like totally intergalactic.
Kasanoff: “We certainly have the canvas for location-based entertainment based on the epicness....What you [will] see in ‘Tetris’ is the teeny tip of an iceberg that has intergalactic significance.”
