If you’re one of those Facebook users with parents or weird cousins that inundate your wall with Mafia Wars invitations, start whimpering, because the end is nigh: The gangster game, developed by Zynga, will adapted into a full-fledged movie. American media mogul Ted Field and Radar Pictures, known for such precious treasures as Swing Vote and The Invention of Lying, will be in charge of bringing it to cinematic life.
Mafia Wars is a multiplayer browser game available on Facebook, MySpace, Sonico, Yahoo!, and the iPhone (read: absolute dominance of online social networks), and currently has almost 26 million active subscribers. It won the 2009 Webby Award People’s Voice Winner in the Games category.
But a movie (which often requires a narrative), Mafia Wars is not. The log line describes the film as a “crime thriller based on the popular video game.” That’s great, except there’s not much foundation for basis: The game is set in New York City and later expanded to include Cuba, Moscow, and Bangkok, and revolves around doing and mastering jobs to earn cash and experience.
Basically, what all these recent content-less adaptations (Bazooka Joe, Battleship, Monopoly) are doing is creating an entire story out of scratch, and then slapping on a brand name to give it marketability. Details are hazy at the moment, but according to Pajiba, “the project is out to writers now.”
Next up: Neopets or FarmVille? Wait a minute…
(via FilmDrunk; title image via Mafia Wars Guru)
