Another video game (in this case, a mobile game) will get an animated film adaptation.
Cartoon Brew recently reported that Cut the Rope, a physics-based puzzle game from Russian gaming company Zeptolab, is headed for the big screen under the tentative title Om Nom: The Movie.
Titled after and starring the candy-loving protagonist from the mobile game, Om Nom will function as an origin story for the character through the eyes of a teenage boy named Evan. The plot of Om Nom kicks off when Evan opens a “secret package containing a living scientific experiment.” That experiment is Om Nom, a creature with an insane sweet tooth, who begins to cause a ruckus in Evan’s hometown. Evan tries to keep Om Nom under control and protect him from his little sister Jordan, government agents, shadowy characters, and other creatures who all want Om Nom for their own purposes.
Om Nom is being fast-tracked pretty quickly, with a late 2016 release window planned. No director or distributor is set, nor is a screenwriter identified. Basically, not much more is known about the film itself, other than that the film will employ the same stylistic design of the game.
Despite Om Nom‘s accelerated production schedule, things appear to be taking hold in a much smoother manner than for the other film based on a mobile game that comes out next year: Angry Birds. While Sony and Rovio have an upward hill to climb, the makers behind Om Nom are striking while the iron is hot. Cut the Rope has racked up over 700 million downloads, while the animated web series Om Nom Stories has logged over 600 million views on YouTube and other in-game platforms.
“It’s not always possible to include a full plot and character development in a mobile puzzle game, which is why we created the Om Nom Stories YouTube series,” said Zeptolab’s creative director Semyon Voinov, who will executive produce Om Nom with Zeptolab CTO and twin brother Efim Voinov. Speaking of the YouTube series, he continues, “These have been so successful that a full-length animated movie was a logical continuation, and also a great opportunity to tell Om Nom’s story to as many people as possible.”
The most interesting part of this story is that the film will be produced by David Wohl and Brad Foxhaven under their Blockade Entertainment banner. Blockade also has another video game based animated film that will come out next year (two, actually): Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper, the former of which recently filled out its voice cast and gained an official release date.
While we won’t know how either film will fare until they hit theaters, Zeptolab CEO Misha Lyalin apparently has the utmost confidence in them, as he approached Blockade for its “great record with movie adaptations of video games,” and its ability “to make an interesting film without losing the spirit and the style of the original.”
Om Nom will be the fourth animated video game movie to release in 2016, following Sly Cooper, Ratchet & Clank, and Angry Birds.
What do you think? Are you interested in Om Nom?
Edited by: Hannah Wilkes
