Rovio
Seriously, America? You’re actually stupid enough to want something like this? Listen, I have absolutely nothing against Angry Birds. It’s a perfectly good way to waste time on the subway if you’re too stupid to read a book. That’s fine. But the fact that a ridiculous iPhone game has become a full-on cultural phenomenon is just too much for me to handle. You see grown men in Angry Birds T-shirts. There’s a Star Wars tie-in. And now it looks like the rotund pig-hating fowl are going to get their own movie.
And we’re not talking a straight-to-video cheapie like the kind toys used to get back in the 80s to cadge a little money from kids. We’re talking a big-budget theatrical feature here, set to release in 2016. Game studio Rovio, obviously rolling in cash due to the fantastic success of their property, hired David Maisel, formerly of Marvel Studios, to develop an in-house film production company just like he did for the comic book company. That production company would transform Rovio’s intellectual property (like Angry Birds and… uh, whatever else they do) into movies. Well, they just announced their first signing.
Producer John Cohen has come aboard the team to produce the Angry Birds movie. Cohen is a Fox Animation veteran who worked on Despicable Me, Robots and Horton Hears A Who, so he’s a expert in churning out totally generic kiddie garbage for a mass audience. It was also his idea to make the new Alvin & The Chipmunks movies. The only problem is that the Angry Birds property really doesn’t have anything but character designs – there’s no narrative, no personalities, no world that they live in. But that doesn’t ever seem to slow Hollywood down.