Film about Tetris seems a step closer

In 2014, Threshold Entertainment announced “Tetris the Movie,” after which it went silent. Producer Larry Kasanoff is now looking for companies that want to buy the film at the film festival in Cannes. The producer already made a movie about the game Mortal Kombat in 1995.

Threshold Entertainment’s press release states that it is a film with a budget of 80 million dollars. The team around the film would have been working with The Tetris Company on the project for over a year. It is not yet clear what the exact name of the film will be, and it is also not known exactly how the financing is. The announcement of Threshold Entertainment during the Cannes Film Festival is therefore primarily a call to investors and distributors to do business.

The intention is that the film will be a Chinese/American co-production and filming should start in 2017 with Chinese actors and locations. The film is touted as a science fiction thriller. Kasanoff says on Deadline that ‘it’s not going to be at all what you think; it will be an interesting surprise’. The film would also be the first in a trilogy.

Kasanoff is collaborating in this regard with Bruno Wu, a Chinese billionaire who, at the end of last year, set up a film fund with $1.6 billion in resources together with Yucheng Group. At the time, he is said to have said he was working on 440 projects, including the development of a Tetris film and a new version of Titanic. Under Beijing Sun Seven Starts Culture, Wu is said to own about 60 film production companies through all kinds of constructions, which already have about twenty English-language films in production.

Tetris was released 32 years ago in the then Soviet Union on June 6, 1984 for Electronics 60, a Russian computer. Two years later, the game came to MS-DOS and quickly conquered the western world as well. In the meantime, the puzzle game has already appeared in many guises, but a feature film was not yet among them.

First version of Tetris, running on a Soviet DVK-2 emulator. Source: Wikipedia