Tetris: The movie…trilogy. Seriously?

And then it got weirdAt some point virtually everyone lost a weekend to this addictive video game. Can’t we just leave it that? Nope. They’re turning it into a movie. A freaking trilogy according to the latest reports.

Tetris is a great game. The little clusters of squares falling at an ever increasing pace while you frantically rotate them and look for a place they will fit. All the while this maddening theme music is playing. And that’s it. There is nothing more to it.

Battleship-1
“It’s a hit!” No, it’s so, so not.

One might think that Hollywood hit bottom when Peter Berg attempted to make a science fiction epic from the Milton Bradley board game “Battleship.”  One would be wrong.

This is one of those stories that you have to double check that it’s not parody. No one likes to look the fool by uncorking a profanity laden social media rant about the utter stupidity of an idea only to find out it was all a big joke. However, by all accounts, this dipshittery is actually going to happen. And it’s not going to be just one movie either. It’s going to be THREE.

Peter Jackson took a beating in some circles for turning The Hobbit into a movie trilogy. Those who read will back me up on this—The Hobbit is in fact an actual story, with characters, a plot, words, sentences, punctuation, chapters…the whole schmeer. All of this was contained in one novel of a relatively modest length. It did not warrant a trilogy of movies but it at least has the elements from which a movie might be constructed. Larry Kasanoff is making a movie trilogy from this:

tetris-o
Behold the literary epic Tetris

That’s not Tetris in a nutshell. That’s Tetris in toto. There is literally nothing about Tetris that is absent from that animated image.  I don’t work in the movie industry but I will stick my neck out to say that if your entire well of subject matter can be contained in a single black and white GIF, chances are you don’t have the makings of a trilogy.

Tetris gets trilogy as story ‘too big’ to fit into single film

Producer Larry Kasanoff is lining up a trilogy about the GameBoy favourite, which featured the simple but addictive formula of shuffling falling shapes into corresponding gaps.

“The story we conceived is so big,” said Kasanoff. “This isn’t us splitting the last one of our eight movies in two to wring blood out of the stone. It’s just a big story.”

One 2.5 megabyte GIF. The only way this could legitimately be split into three installments is if it was 1988 and you were trying to save it out onto 3.5 inch floppy disks.

“We’re not going to have blocks with feet running around the movie,” he said. “But it’s great that people think so. It sets the bar rather low!”

Thank goodness for small favors.

For now Kasanoff is not confirming which, if any, details have fallen into place. “No one has come remotely close to figuring out what we’re doing,” he said.

Now that statement I believe.

Some of the discussion on Reddit is priceless.

Right?

Just how dirty would the money have to be to justify this?

Foodfight, you say?

Enough of this. I have to get back to work on the script I’m writing for Dig Dug.
I wonder if Gary Oldman is available.