This weekend, The Angry Birds Movie is finally delighting children and annoying parents everywhere, so it’s time for Hollywood to check out the App Store and see what other phone games that were really hot a few years ago could be made into a movie. Words With Friends? No, that doesn’t have any cartoon characters. Temple Run? No, there’s actually a little bit of a narrative there, so making it a movie is too easy. Doodle Jump? No, its little guy would look too grotesque in the standard art style of modern kids movies. Really, the best answer is clearly Fruit Ninja, which meets all the criteria by being both really popular a few years ago and completely devoid of anything that seems like it would justify a movie, which is probably why a studio called Vinson Films has just announced that it’s developing a Fruit Ninja movie.
That’s according to The Hollywood Reporter, which says that writers J.P. Lavin and Chad Damiani (How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack) will write the script. There’s no indication of what the movie will be about, but THR’s story acknowledges that the game is about “ninjas with an inexplicable vendetta against produce,” so maybe the adaptation will just run with that. The Angry Birds Movie ended up being a bizarre screed against immigration, but nobody will care if Fruit Ninja rips it off and does the same thing. You have an island full of peaceful ninja characters, evil fruit monsters arrive, and then shit gets sliced up. Throw in a completely misplaced pop song and you’ve got a hit movie.