Good news! Taron Egerton has been cast as the lead in a video game movie! The weird news… it’s ‘Tetris’. Okay, no, there isn’t going to be a movie based on the famous game of blocks. Rather, Egerton will portray Henk Rogers, a Dutch video game designer who was responsible for distributing ‘Tetris’ around the world, including bringing it to the Nintendo Gameboy, where the game really took off in the US.
The news was delivered by entertainment journalist Baz Bamigboye on Twitter:
Breaking: @TaronEgerton , @goldenglobes winner for @rocketmanmovie ,to portray video game designer @henkrogers in #Tetris dir by @jonsbaird .About Cold War legal skirmishes over ownership of the Tetris game.The #Maxwells were involved! pic.twitter.com/VuWYvRGMuD
— Baz Bamigboye (@BazBam) July 16, 2020
‘Teris’ was invented in 1984 by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov, but because he was an employee of the Soviet government, he was not credited or paid royalties for his creation, which was distributed by the company ELORG. In 1996, Henk founded The Teris Company and managed to secure the rights to the game, and he split future profits with Pajitnov.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, and the film could be really interesting in a ‘The Social Network’, ‘The Founder’, ‘Steve Jobs’, kind of way.
As Bamigboye reported, Jon S. Baird is directing. His last movie was 2018’s ‘Stan & Ollie’. This project reunites Egerton with his ‘Kingsman’ producer Matthew Vaughn. A studio wasn’t mentioned, but presumably, this will be through 20th Century Studios.
Egerton won a Golden Globe Award for portraying Elton John in last year’s ‘Rocketman’. He will reportedly be singing again in the upcoming remake of ‘Little Shop of Horror’, opposite Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson, although their castings are all rumored. Billy Porter is the only person that has officially been cast. He will voice the killer plant Audrey II.
Despite being one of the most handsome young actors around, Egerton spends a lot of time doing voice work. Recently he was heard on ‘Watership Down’, ‘The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance’, and ‘Moominvalley’, and he will reprise his role as Johnny the gorilla in ‘Sing 2’ He will voice John Constantine in the upcoming audio adaptation of the comic book ‘The Sandman’.
We first reported that a Tetris movie was in the works in 2014.
Are you intrigued at the thought of a ‘Teris’ movie?
