If the leaked Sony emails taught us anything, it’s that the studio is a stronghold of wrong-headedness and panicked attempts at capturing the zeitgeist (though its execs probably think that’s a cult yoghurt brand.)
It’s about to drop ‘Pixels’, an awful-looking Adam Sandler/Kevin James vehicle that will trample all over your fond memories of classic video games like Pac-Man and now we’ve got worse news: It’s working on an emoji movie. Yep.
Deadline broke the story that Sony Pictures Animation beat out three other studios to win the rights to a script for an animated emoji movie.
The project is co-written by Eric Siegel (a writer and actor who most recently produced TBS’ ‘Men At Work’) and Anthony Leondis (the director of ‘Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters.’) The latter will also direct the emoji masterpiece.
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The emoji idea is particularly appealing to studios because they seem popular and executives with grab vainly at anything that might get people to watch, even if that’s out of a sense of utter jaw dropping contempt.
The upside and downside of jumping on the emoji bandwagon is that there are no rights to the underlying intellectual property to buy – though I suspect the Unicode Consortium will be bummed. That means while Sony could gobble up this script with ease, it’s also likely to face competing movies.
If any of the studios who lost out in this bidding war are looking for a pitch, here’s mine:
Poopi? is a little poop with big dreams, he’s fed up with the crap that life keeps serving him and wants to know how he can become the big smiling emoji? he’s always wanted to be.
Along the way, he meets sassy hand lady ? and crazy tongue emoji?and they have a wild adventure in which everyone learns about☀️life,? love and why actual words are sometimes worth the effort?.
I’ll sell you that for $5 million and an option on the back-end.
➤ Emoji at center of bidding battle won by Sony Animation; Anthony Leondis to direct [Deadline]
Pretend you’re reading about this for ‘research’: The psychology of emoji
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