A possible Tetris movie has been talked about for a year or so now (we made the block-buster joke last time), and it's just slotted one more brick into its development wall. Rush Hour director Brett Ratner has just picked up the project, through his Ratpac Entertainment banner.
Previously in Tetris movie news, Threshold Entertainment's CEO Larry Kasanoff was saying bizarre things about giving an "epic, imaginative" sci-fi story to the plotless puzzle game. Now, in some ways disappointingly, it's all sounding a lot more sensible. The film Ratner is working on isn't some sort of Battleship-type folly, but a Social Network-style drama based on designer Alexey Pajitnov's battle for recognition.
It's a complicated business, but in a nutshell Pajitnov, along with a couple of other players, developed the earliest iteration of Tetris in the communist USSR of the 1980s. When the game became a worldwide smash in the early '90s thanks to Nintendo, Pajitnov had to endure a six-year international legal fight to see a penny of the proceeds. Governments were involved. It all got rather heated.
Ratner's producing partner James Packer was also involved with The Lego Movie, but that's just an amusing coincidence. No other names, including screenwriters, are attached to the Tetris film so far.