Back in 2014, it emerged that Tetris - the phenomenally popular game that made its debut 32 years ago - is being made into a big-budget Hollywood movie. But in fact, the plans to reimagine the game as a cinematic thriller are even bigger than first thought.
Larry Kasanoff - whose company was also behind the Mortal Kombat movie adaptations - said in 2014 that it will be "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." Speaking with Empire this week, he confirmed that it will actually be a sci-fi trilogy.
The move to turn the project into three films was, he said, "purely because the story we conceived is so big. 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." The trilogy is said to have a "global feel", with some filming set to take place in China.
Exactly how the movies will play out remains unclear. Kasanoff said: "We want the story to be a surprise, but it"s a big science-fiction movie. I came up with the idea as I was thinking about Tetris and the theme of creating order out of chaos."
But he added that "no-one has come remotely close to figuring out what we"re doing." We can keep guessing, but Kasanoff remains optimistic that he"ll surprise audiences: "I guarantee you it"s not what you think."
Meanwhile, another blocky gaming franchise is set to become a blockbuster movie. Microsoft"s Mojang subsidiary announced today that Minecraft: The Movie will be released in 2019.