Popular Mobile Game ‘Cut the Rope Heads to Bigscreen

With mobile downloads of over 700 million, Zeptolab’s physics-based online puzzle game franchise Cut the Rope is heading to the big screen.

Tentatively titled after and starring its popular candy-loving main character, the feature Om Nom will be rushed into theaters worldwide by late next year. The feature, which promises “a deeper experience with Om Nom than ever before,” does not yet have a director or distributor locked down, a spokesperson for the Russian gaming company Zeptolab told Cartoon Brew.

Om Nom, which will employ the CG style of the game, will explore the cute monster’s origin story through the eyes of a teenage boy named Evan, who opens a “secret package containing a living scientific experiment,” according to Zeptolab’s press release, thereby unleashing Om Nom, and its insatiable appetite for sweets, upon his tranquil hometown. Evan’s little sister Jordan, government agents, shadowy characters, and other creatures round out Om Nom’s cast, who all want a piece of Cut the Rope’s sugary monster for themselves.

The game’s cinematic metamorphosis is taking a decidely more prudent route than Rovio’s Angry Birds feature, in that it doesn’t boast a production and marketing budget of $180 million. And whereas Angry Birds had a 78-episode television series, Cut the Rope prepped its cinematic crossover with a short-form animated webseries that has logged over 600 million views to date across YouTube and in-game platforms.

“It’s not always possible to include a full plot and character development in a mobile puzzle game, which is why we created the Om Nom Stories YouTube series,” said Zeptolab’s creative director Semyon Voinov, who will executive produce Om Nom with his twin brother, Zeptlab CTO Efim Voinov. “These have been so successful that a full-length animated movie was a logical continuation, and also a great opportunity to tell Om Nom’s story to as many people as possible.”

Om Nom will be produced by Brad Foxhoven and David Wohl of Blockade Entertainment, which is also co-producing an animated feature adaptation of the popular Playstation game Ratchet & Clank with Rainmaker Entertainment. Like Angry Birds and Om Nom, Ratchet & Clank — starring bigshots like Paul Giamatti, John Goodman, Sylvester Stallone, and Rosario Dawson — is also slated for arrival next year, a bounty of sorts for fans of game-based animated films.

Zeptolab CEO Misha Lyalin said that they chose to work with Blockade because of their “great record with movie adaptations of video games,” as well as their ability “to make an interesting film without losing the spirit and the style of the original.”