Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise is due to get a bit bigger with the news that Former Marvel Studio executive David Maisel has joined their team and is being lined up to be the executive producer for the Angry Birds movie.
Maisel said “Rovio has already had amazing success and established a great brand with Angry Birds,” The business model, intellectual properties and the franchise potential of Angry Birds give Rovio the most exciting prospects I have seen in the entertainment business since Marvel in 2003”
Rovio already have people working on a script for the movie but they are working on keeping the script as good as possible, so we won’t be seeing this movie any time soon.
Rovio CEO Mikael Hed has studied other gaming concepts that have moved to the big screen and not done so well, and he intends to make sure the Angry Birds movie does not fall to this curse.
“We are working on the mythology with the movie script and we don’t want to shape the mythology too far until we have that one nail in place,” Hed said. “We’ve seen too many movies based on games that have not performed well” he said.
As well as bringing Maisel on board, Rovio have also acquired Finnish animation studio Kombo to help make the film.
The popularity of Angry Birds has skyrocketed in the past few years since it first went to number one on the iPhone app chart and now we can’t get away from it. It appears everywhere you look there are teddies, bedding and not to mention pretty much every smartphone OS showing off the Angry Birds franchise. So a movie is definitely the next step for Rovio Mobile and Angry Birds.
But CEO Mikael Hed, an app developer until the Angry Birds success, believes the growth of his company has not peaked and he will not base the success of Rovio on one app, and will ensure they’re not a one hit wonder.
“People are still migrating from old-fashioned phones to touch screen devices, and in emerging markets, that’s creating whole new audiences that may not have a TV before but now could have an Android device,” Hed said. “Catering to that audience is important for any media company in the future”
I still struggle to see how a game about birds fired from a slingshot will translate to a 2 hour movie, but who knows, stranger things have happened!