It was only a matter of time before an Angry Birds movie was made. The game and its spin-offs have been way too popular for it to be otherwise, and Hollywood can never resist an already established product that they can re-market. Today we’re receiving news that indicates the film is moving along quite well, as Angry Birds has not one but two directors, which means that we will be seeing this movie before long.
Directorial duties for Angry Birds fall to first-timers Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly. While neither has directed an animated feature before, they have been involved with some pretty big productions: Kaytis worked as animation supervisor on Tangled, and has his hand both in Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen. Reilly was the head of story at Sony Pictures Animation, and holds credits on both Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and Hotel Transylvania. So I suppose that it makes sense to trust these two with Angry Birds.
Angry Birds will be coming to us courtesy of Sony, with a script by King of the Hill writer John Vitti. What the film will actually entail in terms of plot and character is another matter entirely. The game is pretty straightforward: the birds are angry because some green pigs have stolen their eggs. They begin suicide bombing the pigs, who build increasingly complicated structures to protect themselves from the birds’ ire and there’s this king pig, I think, that … man, that’s a weird game.
The secret, I guess, will be to develop the characters of the various birds and set up the pigs as some entertaining villains. I can kind of see it working in an insane, LSD fuelled kind of way.
Angry Birds will come to cinemas on July 1st, 2016, so it’s going to be a long wait. I hope the birds don’t get too angry.