Angry Birds: The Movie to become a reality soon

PanARMENIAN.Net - The man who was instrumental in bringing Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk to the big screen is to promising Angry Birds: The Movie will soon become a reality.

According to wired.co.uk, former Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel has become special advisor to Rovio and told Variety: "There has been so much chatter about an 'Angry Birds' movie, but it's now real. The process is starting now."

Maisel added that it makes sense to build upon the game's worldwide success - it has been downloaded more than 250 million times since its launch late in 2009. He told Variety: "People are interacting with these characters six inches from them each time they play, and that creates an emotional connection," Maisel said. "This is not an American thing. It's not even a Finnish thing. It's a global thing that's something I've never seen before. It will be exciting to expand (this intellectual property) within Hollywood."

Rumors of an imminent film hotted up in early June when Rovio announced it had bought Finnish animation studio Kombo. As this news became public, Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio's chief marketing officer, told The Telegraph: "We haven't made any announcements yet. But you can put one and one together - if you look at the fact we bought an animation studio last week and we're basically beefing up our capabilities in the animation area - you can see we are making a lot of this [the movie] ourselves."

Rovio has also recently secured $42 million in financing.

Rovio CEO Mikael Hed added to Variety: "We're building a media company and have always been interested in moving further into the entertainment space. But we are taking it one step at a time so that we can use our strength to build an important entertainment presence from outside of the major studios."