Emojis Are Coming to a Theater Near You

The success of last year’s Lego Movie might have filmmakers thinking that “everything is awesome” when it comes to script ideas, but Sony’s new project has us like:

Sony Pictures Animation outbid other studios for the rights to a movie pitch about emojis -- the pictorial emotions and objects used in texts and social media posts that people either love or hate.

The deal cost the studio nearly $1 million. The film will be helmed by Kung Fu Panda director Anthony Leondis, who will also co-write the script with Eric Siegel, who produced TBS's new show Men at Work and who has acted in movies including 2002's Gilda Radnor: It's Always Something. The studio chief told Kristine Belson, SPA’s president, to be aggressive in securing the script, according to Deadline. Michelle Raimo Kouyate will produce the movie.

The lack of property rights for emojis, along with their global popularity, could make the film a smart buy for the studio, but the storyline for the flick is still unknown. The success of other circular yellow characters -- the minions that first appeared as sidekicks in Despicable Me and were promoted to the main characters of their namesake movie, released earlier this month -- might be a marketing draw, Vulture speculates.

Doubling down on pop-culture touchstones, Sony is also releasing Pixels today. Pixels, directed by Chris Columbus and starring Adam Sandler, is an animated and live-action movie about aliens who attack Earth in the form of videogame characters like Pac Man.