With video games, board games, theme park rides, blogs and short films all providing the inspiration for big screen movies in recent years, Hollywood executives are clearly looking at a broad church of source material. We reported last week on Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company buying up the rights to the short film “Pixels,” and now another sub-5 minute calling card by a young director has made a splash.
The idea of shooting a trailer specifically to raise interest and money in a project is not a new one, by any means; Sam Raimi did it to help him get funding on “The Evil Dead,” for instance. Now Irish music video/commercial helmer Gary Shore has found some success with this model too, as Heat Vision report that Universal and Working Title have acquired his trailer, “The Cup of Tears,” in order to adapt it into a feature.
The director filmed the project in his spare time, calling in favors, with the intention of breaking into the feature world. It’s clearly worked, as Working Title senior VP Amelia Granger found it, and the company is now developing the project from a treatment by Shore, who’ll direct, with a writer being brought on board.
You can have a look at the clip for yourself underneath, but we weren’t terribly impressed. The visuals are pretty in a sort of abstract way, but it basically looks like “Sky Captain” meets “Ninja Assassin” (in fact, more or less directly replicating the plot of the latter), as directed by someone with a serious hard-on for Zack Snyder; there’s no sense that Shore can tell a story, or even film a coherent action sequence. It’s two and a half minutes of geek bait (Ninjas! Samurai! Missiles! Spaceships!), though, so we’re sure the kind of people who call cinematography “graphics” will lap it up.