Tetris Movie Latest To Join Brand-Hungry Hollywood Machine

Look out, red carpet. Hollywood's turning another video game into a movie. The thrilling game of ... "Tetris." Wait, what?

Yes, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday the falling-blocks game that inspired OCD-like behavior in a generation of Game Boy-playing children will head to the big screen.

But, as Threshold Entertainment's CEO told the Journal, "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."

Well, thank goodness. It's not hard to see how the intensely visual, zombie apocalypse game "Resident Evil" not only became a movie, but a successful movie franchise.

Even a pretty straightforward one-on-one fighting game like "Mortal Kombat" was able to inspire a storyline and a screenplay in the mid-'90s and gross roughly four times its budget.

CHRISTOPHER LAMBERT AS LORD RAYDEN IN "MORTAL KOMBAT": "One of you three will decide the outcome of the tournament."

But "Tetris"? Now, that would be a feat.

Just the headlines provide enough of the predictable skepticism the blocks can become a blockbuster.

But this could be another step in a new direction for Hollywood. This is a studio putting money behind a marketable, established idea instead of original content or a big-name celeb.

The Threshold CEO also told the Journal, "Brands are the new stars of Hollywood."

Cinema Blend points out the third highest-grossing movie of 2014 was "The LEGO Movie."

"And it's a movie that at its core is about building blocks. So, maybe it's not so crazy that a producer of a different building blocks movie believes in brands over celebrity."

Let's just hope a plot — like that long, straight four-block piece — shows up soon. We'll need it to get an idea if this thing is going to work. (Video via YouTube / Spectre255)

By Cliff Judy