Since Hollywood never met a pop-culture fixation it couldn’t appropriate (see: this weekend’s Angry Birds Movie), perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that someone is working on bringing the Fruit Ninja mobile app to the big screen in – get this – a “live-action family comedy.”
No, it’s really not too surprising that we’ll be getting a Fruit Ninja movie (and possibly a franchise, seeing as how these kinds of things usually go), but that certainly doesn’t make it any less depressing. And here I was, just coming to terms with the fact that The Emoji Movie is probably going to make bucketloads of money.
For those of you not versed in app-phenomenon culture, Fruit Ninja is the second-highest-selling iOS game of all time, with more than 1 billion downloads since its launch across mobile platforms. It essentially amounts to an endless barrage of fruit flying up onto the screen that the player can hack away at indefinitely. Cinematic in the truest sense of the word.
For whatever it’s worth, Tripp Vinson is producing this project under his Vinson Films production banner, with J.P. Lavin and Chad Damiani penning the script for a film that will stretch slicing and chopping virtual fruit into a full-fledged feature about ninjas violently airing their strange grievances against just about anything you’d find in the produce section at your local supermarket. Lavin and Damiani recently got done writing something called How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, so they’ve certainly got some experience in wrangling bizarre concepts, and one of their past scripts (Kamikaze Love) made the Black List. So there’s a glimmer of hope here.
No word yet on when Fruit Ninja will be slicing its way into theaters, but it will likely be after The Emoji Movie, before the Angry Birds sequel, and around the same time as that probably “dark” and “gritty” Temple Run adaptation. God save us all.