Angry Birds announced it would have its own feature film after celebrating its third anniversary. The 3D CG-animated film is set to hit the theaters in summer 2016 and it's fully funded and produced by Rovio outside of the standard studio system.
Rovio also has a huge community of Angry Birds fans to promote the film to – assuming they're still fans in 2016. Debuted in 2009, the Angry Birds game has been downloaded more than 1 billion times across platforms and versions. Most recently, the game launched its latest venture,
Angry Birds Star Wars, which soared to the top of the US iPhone charts within two and a half hours of release. In October 2012, executive vice president Andrew Stalbow said the games have been downloaded more than 1bn times, and had 20m-30m daily active players, and 200m monthly active players.
Rovio Entertainment has confirmed that the movie adaptation of the game is officially in development with
John Cohen, producer of
Despicable Me. Cohen likewise said that he's excited to be on board, and admitted that he's played countless hours of Angry Birds over the past few years, which he can now "justify as research for the movie." Serving as the executive producer is
David Maisel, the former Chairman of
Marvel Sudios who also executive produced "
Iron Man".
Upon announcing the project, Rovio CEO,
Mikael Hed, said, "John's an exceptionally talented producer, and we're delighted to have him join the flock. With John's hands-on producer background and David's expertise in establishing and running his own successful studio, these two are the dream team for making a movie outside the studio system. Both professionals have the ideal skills and vision to achieve incredible things."
"We're going to roll it out on all possible devices," said head of animation Nick Dorra at the time. "We're looking at building a video app for that, and we're also looking at partnerships and so on... We want to be on all screens." By keeping control of the movie's finance and production, Rovio will be able to choose its distribution channels for that too: potentially making it available to watch on smartphones and tablets shortly after its cinema debut.
Besides "
Angry Birds", more and more movies are made from video games, such as "
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider", "
BloodRayne", even the 1993's "
Super Mario Bros".
While fans have a four-year wait for the film to be released, Rovio will be filling the gap with short-form animation.
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