It was brought to our attention here at PCU, that Sony Pictures is working on an “emoji movie”, set in the world of smartphone apps.

Sony acquired the rights to this IP after a three studio bidding war which took place last year.  The final price tag?  Over $1 MILLION DOLLARS.  That’s right, multiple studios had a bidding war, and over a million dollars was shelled out to produce a movie about those little faces & clip-art-style pictures that appear all over social media & text messages these days.

According to Deadline.com, the script will be written by Tony Leonidis (director of Igor and Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters) and Eric Siegel (one of the producers of TBS’s short-lived series Men At Work), with Leonidas in the director’s chair.  The movie is slated to hit theaters in 2017, and the plot (according to Sony Pictures Animation President Kristine Belson) is somewhat laid out in its official description: “Inside your phone, there’s a secret world–and we enter through the text app where we discover Emoji Valley, where the industrious Emoji live and work”.

A few of us here at PCU got together & wracked our brains as to how we could cogently respond to this revelation.  We were momentarily stumped.  HOWEVER, we gathered our resolve, and came up with a couple of things that we’d like to get across to those who would make this movie:

Adam: “Dear Hollywood: I am sure that, short-term, you are looking forward to the money that will line your pockets and the martinis that you’ll be spending it on. But for fuck’s sake, for ONCE, will you think about the future of humanity? You’re the land that gave us Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird or Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night and made us reconsider our racism. You gave us The Artist and made us remember all the joy and love of classic Hollywood dance cinema. You gave us Superman and made us believe a man could fly. You gave us Saving Private Ryan and showed us the horrors of war. Hollywood can change us for the better beyond mere dollars for your new convertibles. Please: the very notion of Emoji: The Movie is invariably based on 1) people were suckers for The LEGO Movie and 2) we will make money from it. PLEASE, stop thinking of money. Kill this thing and go back to making the world better.”

Doug: “Seriously Sony?  Do you REMEMBER what a dumpster fire Pixels was?”

Marc: “This is equivalent to ‘FART: The Soundtrack’.”

Ashley: “If they’re really out of ideas, then Hollywood needs to start reading some damn books. I’d rather film adaptations of books than this “oh, what’s trending now?” bullshit.”

Gloria: “This is abomination not even worthy to shine The LEGO Movie‘s shoes (if it had shoes).”

Ray: “I don’t care about it and I’ll probably won’t see it.”

Armand: “This is a sign that the end times are upon us.”

Ben was rendered nearly mute by this, so he offered up the following (photoshopped) picture:

Seriously, though.  It’s “ideas” like this one that, in this writer’s opinion, are contributing to the dumbing-down of society as a whole.  At any time during  the process of putting this project together, did ANYONE stop to consider that emojis are becoming so prevalent these days, that people are forgetting how to actually write??

Yes, texting has become one of the foremost forms of communication over the past 20 or so years.  However, we need to remember that language is a beautiful thing.  In the immortal words of Robin Williams’s character of John Keating, “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.”.