Escape rooms are going to the movies

Some of the best movies in the history of cinema were set in a room. Great actors, amazing dialogues and oftentimes sweltering, frightening atmosphere. Remember Cube (1997)? If anything, the suffocating movie surely gave a couple ideas to escape game creators. Clue (1985) was one of the predecessors of escape games: in a strange, creepy house, the guests are invited to solve a murder mystery. Wolfgang Petersen’s masterpiece, Das Boot (1981) was shot in a suffocating submarine, while Panic Room (2002) is one of the latest piece in the series of these unique movies. These pieces of brilliant filmmaking have definitely paved the way for the escape room industry.

We love these films and we love playing escape games. Many enthusiasts have been dreaming of a movie that is set in an escape room. Hundreds of themes, hundreds of possibilities. If you’ve played escape games, you surely know the feeling: it would take minutes to write an exciting script right after you’ve escaped a room. Playing puzzles has already inspired people from all over the world to write articles, blogs and create their own version of games. The industry now indeed covers many areas, but feature films have been missing from the list. 

When cinema meets escape rooms, it’s an exciting marriage of magic worlds. Boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred when you enter a finely tuned escape room, and the best movies have the same effect. Wonder what is it like when you get both experiences at the same time? The booming escape room industry has apparently grabbed the attention of Hollywood and It seems like that an escape room-movie might become a reality very soon.

Sony has reportedly bought a live escape room themed script earlier this year and is planning to release a movie based on the piece. Neal Moritz, who worked on Goosebumps and 21 Jump Street is most probably going to produce the upcoming film. Although the plot is still unknown, we have a couple of ideas. It is no wonder that filmmakers, who are constantly looking for a good story, have found their way to real life escape games.

It could very well be a chilly, gritty thriller, featuring some of the tough guys: a Mickey Rourke or an Al Pacino or a horror, with a mind-blowing twist in the plot. Some rooms might inspire a screenwrite to create a great comedy or a children’s movie.  Given the countless varieties of themes out there, the upcoming movie’s genre can potentially be anything.

Apart from being dedicated players, most of our readers are definitely big cinema lovers as well. What do you think will this upcoming film be about? Maybe a love story? Or something absolutely unexpected, say, an art film heading straight to the Cannes Film Festival? We can’t wait to find out more about the project!