'Angry Birds' to become a movie?

Plans are reportedly afoot to make a movie adaptation of the hit iPhone game Angry Birds.

Rovio, the Finnish firm behind the property, wants to expand Angry Birds into new platforms such as movies, animated TV shows and comics and has been meeting with various Hollywood studios and agents in the last few weeks.

Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Mobile, told Variety that the company is keen to capitalise quickly on the popularity of the Angry Birds brand.

He said: "It doesn't make sense [to produce a slate of different games] when you have a hit of any calibre. When you create brand equity, to do that again would be a difficult task rather than nurture and build around what you have."

The full game has so far sold more than 6.5 million times, while a free version has been downloaded 11 million times. A $4.99 iPad version has posted 200,000 sales.

Rovio's ideas for long-form animated features are said to be inspired by Aardman, who produce the stop-motion-animated Wallace & Gromit adventures. Hed also acknowledged the influence of Pixar's approach to filmmaking.

"The challenge is to make sure the brand is relevant when the movie comes out," he said. "Time and time again, [Pixar] take an unknown brand and make it big."

> 'Angry Birds' coming to PS3, PSP, DS