Angry Birds Possibly Flapping From iPhone to Movie Theaters

vansau

Mortician of Love
May 25, 2010
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Angry Birds Possibly Flapping From iPhone to Movie Theaters



Developer Rovio has hit a paydirt with its popular smartphone puzzler Angry Birds, and now it's planning to turn the game into a movie.

Despite the fact that a good film based on a videogame has yet to come out of Hollywood, people keep on trying to make one. Well, theoretically. They certainly keep on making movies based on games. As it turns out, the latest title in development for a celluloid treatment is <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds>Angry Birds, a popular smartphone puzzle game.

Mikael Hed, the CEO of Rovio (the developer behind Angry Birds), recently revealed to Reuters that his company is currently meeting with various Hollywood studios about developing the popular game into a movie.

Angry Birds is known for many things: charming artwork, challenging puzzles, and addictive gameplay. It isn't known for an amazing plot, though, since the story is all about how a bunch of birds are slingshot across a screen in order to get their eggs back from the pigs who stole them. Exactly what the movie adaptation would be about remains to be seen.

According to Hed, though, he wants to turn Angry Birds into a, "fully-fledged entertainment brand," similar to what Pixar has done with its various movies. "We want to go beyond games," Hed said.

The app, which sells for $0.99 on the iPhone, has been downloaded over 6.5 million times since it was released. Meanwhile, the free version of the game (which features much more limited content) has been downloaded over 11 million times. Versions of the game are coming to the Palm and Android platforms in the next couple of weeks, and ports for <a href=http://www.gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=133310>PSP, Wii, and DSi consoles are all planned, too.

As someone who often finds himself playing Angry Birds during particularly boring class lectures, I have no problem admitting that the game is great fun. However, I'm not sure it's worthy of getting made into a movie. In order to be great, movies require compelling plots and relatable characters, and Angry Birds doesn't really have either.

Source: <a href=http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-50894620100817>Reuters via <a href=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38760647/ns/technology_and_science-games/?ns=technology_and_science-games>MSNBC

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T-Bone24

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Dec 29, 2008
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I don't even know how to process this.

An iPhone game... a movie? I... whuh... buh...
 

BishopOfBattle

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Jul 14, 2008
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I haven't played it, but based on the art style, I would guess they're likely pitching it like a young kids film. Maybe an educational style young kids movie like Blue's Clues or something. Or maybe even something like the Chicken Little movie that came out awhile ago.

Either way, I wouldn't expect them to try and do a straight adaptation of the game, or even really try to bring the gameplay over at all. Likely it'll just be your average kids movie and plot that happens to share a name (and maybe some artistic stylings) of the game.
 

blitz609

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Sep 11, 2008
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This sounds about as awesome as Battleship: The Movie, which sounds incredibly lame.
 

Jared

The British Paladin
Jul 14, 2009
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Talk about one huge jump for mobile media! Thats...pretty impressive someone could think of making a movie from it!
 

Mozza444

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Nov 19, 2009
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Ooo so it's now coming to Android, that's somethng to look forward to.
As for a Movie? Haha.
 

Cynical skeptic

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Apr 19, 2010
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...

Don't you love how one guy makes simple game (crush the castle), then another guy adds some "cute" bullshit to it, and suddenly it sells millions of copies?

Its like iphone games work exactly opposite the rest of the industry.
 

TylerC

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Nov 12, 2008
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This has to be one of the worst fucking ideas ever. Plus I'm pretty sure Crush the Castle came before Angry Birds, like how Trenches completely ripped-off Con-Artist's Warfare games.

Cynical skeptic said:
...

Don't you love how one guy makes simple game (crush the castle), then another guy adds some "cute" bullshit to it, and suddenly it sells millions of copies?

Its like iphone games work exactly opposite the rest of the industry.
gah, ninja'd.
 

Gildan Bladeborn

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Aug 11, 2009
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vansau said:
In order to be great, movies require compelling plots and relatable characters, and Angry Birds doesn't really have either.
See, that's why I think this might actually work fairly well - since there's basically nothing to adapt apart from the art style, so long as somebody doesn't stupidly try to script in the mechanics of an iPhone app, there's no way they could screw the plot or characters up, since there really aren't any. With no obligation to tie anything beyond the visuals to the originating game, you could theoretically avoid most of the pitfalls that seem to plague game to film adaptations; provided of course that they actually write a decent script - nothing stops non-game adaptation films from being terrible after all.
 

DarkPanda XIII

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Nov 3, 2009
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Sad part is that it is a bad enough idea as the time when they have, and are still making the movie that was roughly made from the board game 'Battleship'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_%28film%29

Despite what parts of the wikipedia page says, yes, it was originally invented off of the board game.
 

Devil's Due

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Sep 27, 2008
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Oh man, I'm unsure how to respond to this. Movies based off games rarely do well, but a iPhone? That's just... setting up for failure. I'm trying to figure out how it'll even look. I'd actually laugh if it was someone playing the whole game for a movie.
 

TheYellowCellPhone

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Sep 26, 2009
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Wat.[footnote]Intentional bad spelling[/footnote]

When has a movie or television series ever been just as good as the game, but this? This is sad, turning an addictive iPhone game into a two hour film.