It appears that Hollywood has discovered a new reservoir in its tireless quest for adaptation-worthy source material: mobile games. With Angry Birds launching itself to the top spot at the domestic box office over the weekend, it didn’t take long until we heard about another game-turned-movie. According to THR, a gory slasher flick is next in line.
Hide your watermelons, folks — Fruit Ninja is on its way to theaters. A silver screen version of the popular mobile game is now in the works, but before you scoff and roll your eyes, consider that it has already been downloaded one billion times. That’s billion — with a B. That figure means a massive built-in audience for the film and is good enough to make it the second-highest-selling iOS game of all time, second only to — you guessed it — Angry Birds.
Since the game itself is essentially plotless, adapting it effectively may seem like a tall order, but it seems like Vinson Films — which will produce the film — has found the right man for the job. That man is Chad Damiani, who recently adapted Chuck Sambuchino’s offbeat, off-the-wall book, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (And They Will), for the big screen.
The logic behind the choice is clear: If you can make a script out of an absurdist handbook for surviving a lawn gnome invasion, you can make a script out of anything. Unlike that film, however, Fruit Ninja will be shot in live-action, leaving open the possibility that a whole lot of actual fruit will be harmed during the filming of this project.
No word yet on when it will be released, or who will star in it, but we’ll keep you posted as additional news breaks.
In the meantime, you’ll just have to content yourself with punishing produce on your phone or tablet.
Download Angry Birds app for iOS or Android.
Download Fruit Ninja app for iOS or Android.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?