Monument Valley, the M.C. Escher-inspired puzzle game that stormed the mobile gaming world back in 2014, is getting a live-action movie adaption. Paramount Pictures will be handling the project alongside Weed Road, the studio responsible for the movie adaptions of A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. Development of the screenplay will be spearheaded by Patrick Osborne, the director of the Feast short film that debuted alongside Disney’s Big Hero 6. For now, there’s no information on the plot or what the movie will be like, beyond the fact that it will be a hybrid of a live-action and CGI affair, and it will see live-action characters roaming around some of the incredible landscapes found in Monument Valley and its sequel.
While a mobile game with a formula like Monument Valley’s doesn’t need a very strong story to stand on in order to attract and keep players, a movie almost always needs a good storyline. There are a few exceptions to that rule where the story exists to justify the action, as seen in the likes of Kung Fury, and this may well end up being the case with this movie. The original game did have a storyline, albeit a small one, in the form of Princess Ida and her journey for repentance (warning: the rest of the paragraph is full of spoilers for both Monument Valley games). She had stolen the sacred geometry from the humans for her own people, the Crow people, and used it to restore their world. The game is her journey to give the sacred geometry back, and as she proceeds, she slowly regains her memories and eventually realizes who she really is, and the sad fact that humanity met its demise due to her act of theft. In the sequel, surviving human woman Ro and her daughter seek to restore Monument Valley and the sacred geometry to make a viable environment for humans again. Either storyline could be ripe for a movie, but will likely take some reworking and liberal editing to make a good screenplay.
Monument Valley is far from the first mobile game franchise to get a movie; that honor arguably goes to Angry Birds, though you could technically count any number of movie-adapted video game franchises that have hit the mobile scene over the years, such as Prince of Persia and Street Fighter, both of which had movies and mobile games long before Angry Birds came out. Monument Valley getting a movie is nonetheless an interesting development that could point to more mobile-first franchises getting movie deals in the future.