Sorry, but there are definitely going to be more movies about apps
We’re entering a new age of moviemaking. Or, rather, an extension of one in which we’ve already been living; as the New York Times notes in this illuminating new piece, only one of last year’s top 20 grossing movies was based on a wholly original screenplay. Contrast that to 1996, when nine of them were live-action movies with original scripts. The times have already changed, but they’re now they’re beginning to contort. Because what happens when you’re working with existing content is that you begin to run out of it—once you’re rebooting CHiPS as a gay panic comedy, you know you’re running out of content. This breeds desperation.
One of the prime subjects of Alex French’s “How to Make a Movie Out Of Anything— Even A Mindless Phone Game” is Tripp Vinson, a Hollywood producer that’s worked on some of the most forgettable movies ever made (“What’s Your Number,” “The Number 23,” and “After the Sunset” among them). Vinson admits that, in this curious era, he’s “forced to look at everything as though it could be I.P.” French notes that this includes “nonnarrative IP: stuff with big followings but no stories, or even characters, already cooked in.”
While this is the thinking behind the universally scorned Emoji Movie, it’s not a brand new concept. The success of The Lego Movie really got things moving, and then a movie about an Ouija board was successful enough to spawn a sequel. Now, Hasbro, the company behind Ouija, is said to be developing everything from Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering to Hungry Hungry Hippos and Play-Doh for film adaptations.
While this may all sound cynical and depressing, the biggest takeaway here is that by building films out of popular IP with no stories attached, what we’re ending up with are original screenplays. Stories, characters, settings, and mythologies have to be drawn up whole cloth. Vinson, for example, hired two screenwriters—J. P. Lavin and Chad Damiani—to write a script for Fruit Ninja, a mobile game where a ninja slices up pineapples.