Remember that Tetris movie that got announced a while back? Well, it has now found a home on the Apple TV+ plus service, and the company has just shown off an incredibly short piece of footage as part of its 2023 showreel.
The movie – which is directed by Jon S. Baird (Stan & Ollie, Filth) from a script by Noah Pink (Genius) – charts the real-life battle to secure the domestic console rights to the titular Russian puzzle game created by Alexey Pajitnov.
Rocketman star Taron Egerton assumed the role of Henk Rogers, the Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur who was instrumental in securing the console rights to the game for Nintendo, which would bundle it with its Game Boy handheld – a move which unquestionably helped the portable system become a massive commercial success. Rogers' own studio, Bullet-Proof Software, would handle the Game Boy port of the game, which eventually sold an incredible 35 million copies.
Nikita Yefremov plays Pajitnov, while Roger Allam portrays the infamous tycoon Robert Maxwell, whose Mirrorsoft publishing arm was also in contention to secure the rights to the game.
Tetris will launch on Apple TV+ next year.
This isn't the only Tetris movie that has been mooted in recent times; back in 2016, it was announced that Threshold Global Studios had secured the rights to make a trilogy of Tetris films in China with an $80 million budget.
Larry Kasanoff – the film's producer – told Empire that it needed to be three films 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. 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." Nothing has been heard of that project since.