Rovio: Angry Birds will be bigger than ever before

Finnish games giant Rovio is spending millions to make Angry Birds a smash hit once again.

Today (Thursday April 28th), the firm is launching Angry Birds Action, a new free-to-play pinball arcade title for smartphones that ties in with the upcoming Angry Birds animated movie, which arrives in the UK next month.

Rovio tells MCV that it believes Angry Birds can even recapture its former popularity.

Angry Birds can absolutely be as big as it was,” said CCO Alex Lambeek. But now we are moving from being really hot in games to being a hot property in entertainment. It is a much broader space. We will have a wider appeal than we have ever had before. In that sense, we will be bigger than we have ever been before.”

Action will contain a further 24 mini-games that are accessed by scanning special QR Bird Codes.

The firm says that there will be more than one billion Bird Codes globally, including some found on Angry Birds tie-in products with brands such as LEGO, McDonalds, H&M, Toys R Us, Ravensburger’s and Peperami.

All of this centres on the film, which is coming to UK cinemas on Friday, May 13th.

We are experiencing a big resurgence in popularity with the movie coming out and appealing to a broader audience than purely through the games – though they are still core to our business,” Lambeek said.

The movie will make everyone interested in Angry Birds and we’ll be relevant to everyone. Of course, we have ambitions beyond the movie as well.

The Angry Bird Movie is going to be one of the biggest blockbuster animation films of year. It’ll be right up there. Whether it is the biggest or not is hard to predict in the movie world, but the feedback we’ve had to the trailers and from the few people who have seen the film has been fantastic.”