Sony signs deal to make Emojis, the movie – coming soon to a cinema near you
It was only a matter of time before this happened: Sony has signed a new deal to make a movie based on emojis, the colourful little smiley faces sand symbols embedded on your mobile device. Is a cash of thumbs up – or more a smiling pile of poo? We're not sure…
Reports suggest the movie will be co-written by Eric Siegel and Anthony Leondis, the director of Kung-Fu Panda. Deadline reported that while three Hollywood studios bid for the film, Sony Pictures Animation clinched the deal.
The unusual thing about the movie is that there are no rights to be bought: emojis are controlled by the Unicode Consortium, the body in charge of the Unicode Standard, which is designed to make character encoding completely consistent across all devices. It doesn't own the rights to emojis – it just makes sure they look similar on all devices.
It's everyone's favourite emoji – but can it be turned into a character? (Source: Getty)
Emojis have become something of an obsession since the 1990s, when their older, less jazzy cousins, emoticons, became symbols of the texting generation. In the 1990s Japanese mobile giant NTT DoCoMo came up with a set of 172 pictograms, to be used in lieu of emoticons. These days, there are 722 official emojis – with the latest additions including a bottle with a popping cork, a burrito and a unicorn face.
And everyone is getting in on the act. Yesterday, Tesco created the world's biggest emojis in a field near Bath to "cheer up commuters".
Earlier this month, a fiendishly difficult London Underground stop emoji quiz had most of the internet scratching its head. Bow, car, car, car, car, car? We're still confused…