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Here are five suggested treatments for the upcoming Tetris movie

Tetris movie

In the last year, while you’ve been bravely and sensibly doing your best to muddle through life, becoming the best version of yourself, a company called Threshold Global Studios have instead been laying the groundwork for a trilogy of Tetris movies.

Speaking of cheap efforts, here’s a nice list of free Steam games for you to try.

Tetris, nominally about finding order in chaos but really, everyone knows, about waiting for a 4×1 block you desperately need but never comes. Tetris, now 32 years old – like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you can imagine them saying, nodding to each other, rationalising their way into a license totally and self-evidently unfit for purpose.

It’s an $80 million production, and there are no directors, actors or script attached. This means that somebody is now going to be paid to sit in a room and write a script for Tetris as their job. It’s going to go really well, but just in case, here are a few treatments we consider a perfect match for one of the biggest names in pre-Russian Federation gaming.

The L Word

Tetris movie

Romcom in which an upside-down T block meets an L shape on a transatlantic flight, and one posits that the two cannot be friends since ultimately they were created to mush their parts together. Upon arrival in New York, however, the T block’s magazine editor tasks her with trying to get an L shape to fall in love with her within 10 days for a article. She does so, only to find that the L shape is only going along with it to fulfil a bet of his own. Sally – or whatever we were calling her, T block? – confronts the L shape at a wedding and the pair part ways in acrimony.

On New Year’s Eve, Harry – right, L shape – finally reads the published article, in which the T block reveals that she “lost the one person she ever fell for”. Harry chases down Sally’s taxi before it reaches the airport, and the two reveal their true feelings for one another. I mean, it’s all there on Wikipedia.

Waiting for Tetromino

Tetris movie

Two bickering old men – played by Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart, the only two old men anybody has any interest in watching bicker – wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of a 4×1 block they need to clear four or more rows. It never comes, and the two-and-a-half hour running time is instead used to explore existential horrors and questions of the heart.

Tetromino being the geometric term for shapes composed of four square blocks each – and you thought this was just a fluff piece. You’ll come away from this slightly wiser, you’ll see.

Battleship Potemkin: Tetris

Tetris movie

Shot-for-shot remake of the 1925 Soviet silent film. The most faithful recreation of a classic movie you’ve ever seen, from the pram dancing down the Odessa Steps, down to the frame-juddering effect seen only in the earliest cinema – except for the Potemkin herself, reimagined as a crude upside-down T shape. Rihanna reprises her role from the 2012 science fiction board game adaptation, Battleship.

L-Plane

Tetris movie

Passengers trapped in an airborne L-shaped block hurtle inexorably towards the Earth. The cabin crew ask if there are any engineers on board, and there is just one: Bruce Willis. He explains that a full quarter of the plane’s weight has been inexplicably offloaded onto a huge cube on its side, sending the craft into a spin that can only be stopped by drilling deep into its core. Once inside the plane’s centre, Willis detonates a bomb that separates the jet into two pieces. The pilots steer the remaining portion harmlessly into a waiting hole in the ground, where the passengers gratefully live out the rest of their days.

The plan is for Alexey Pajitnov to cameo as a passenger playing Tetris on 3DS as the plane breaks apart around him. When Pajitnov refuses to be associated with a film so cynical, he will be replaced by an actor audiences could plausibly mistake for the Tetris designer.

There Will Be Blocks

Tetris movie

In this take on Tetris nobody actually writes a script, instead casting Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role and giving him a full year to go method. Here he comes now: Daniel Day-Lewis on the concrete steps of the Moscow computing centre that birthed Tetris, engaging passers-by in quiet conversation, taking meticulous notes. There he is four months later, diving from his first floor apartment window into far-too-small bins – his landlady begging him to stop, Day-Lewis relishing the bruises, knowing that each adds to the power of his performance. Finally, Daniel-Day Lewis, walking onto set the first day to gasps from the crew, having asked a surgeon to contort his spine into a fixed L shape. There Will Be Blocks wins every Oscar you ever heard of, including Best Animated Short and Original Song.