Making a movie based on a classic video game is not a new concept for Hollywood, and making a movie based on a video game that nobody has heard of is also not new, but making a movie about an iPhone game is still a relatively fresh concept. Not as fresh as, say, a completely original movie that isn’t based on a video game, but it’s better than another Super Mario Bros. or whatever.
Anyway, Deadline is reporting that Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt—the writers behind Olympus Has Fallen and Expendables 3—are writing a film adaptation of iPhone first-person shooter The Drowning. The game is about smudging your greasy fingers all over the screen of your expensive telephone in order to kill waves of zombie-like monsters, and the movie will apparently expand that solid premise into an “ecological horror tale” about some bad people—let’s call them “BP”—accidentally releasing a bunch of evil “micro-organisms” while digging for oil. That’s as far as the description goes, but we assume there will be some zombie-like monsters that need to be smudged at as well. Also, we’ll be interested to see if the movie version of The Drowning—which is being produced by Radar Pictures, a studio that had a hand in the most recent remakes of The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—will maintain the game’s “free-to-play” model. Maybe theaters could let people in to see the movie for free, but every few minutes they’d have to pay a few dollars to recharge their “movie power.” That would be fun.