Sanrio is spending $240 million on a Hello Kitty movie

So that’s why Sanrio has been charging $8.99 for 50 cents’ worth of plastic with a cartoon cat face on it for the past 40 years: It’s been saving up for a blockbuster Hello Kitty movie. Deadline reports that the Japanese company is planning to produce and finance a feature film based on the adventures of its unsettlingly expressionless cat/little girl hybrid, with a budget of between $160 million and $240 million. That number includes advertising, which makes the whole thing sound slightly less bananas. (For comparison, Jurassic World cost a reported $150 million; it’s unclear based on the source whether that number includes P&A, but we’re 99.9 percent sure it doesn’t.)