The long-in-the-works “Hello Kitty” movie has landed its screenwriter. Deadline confirms “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser” scribe Lindsey Beer has been tapped to pen the project for New Line. Not much is known in the way of plot, but the film will presumably be centered around the ubiquitous, Sanrio-created feline and her friends.
The brand Hello Kitty began in 1974 when the bow-sporting cat made her debut on a coin purse. Since then, the character’s likeness have been bestowed on everything from notebooks to waffle irons. More than 50,000 Hello Kitty products have been sold in 130 countries.
Known Universe, the production company Beer recently launched with fellow screenwriters Nicole Perlman (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (“Tomb Raider”), is executive producing “Hello Kitty.” The film began to move forward when New Line, FlynnPictureCo, and Sanrio made a deal earlier this year. This was the “first time such a deal got made outside Japan in [Hello Kitty’s] 45-year history,” the source notes.
Beer has a number of projects in the pipeline, including sci-fi “Chaos Walking,” an adaptation of Patrick Rothfuss’ “The Kingkiller Chronicle,” and a women-centric “Fast & Furious” spinoff. Robertson-Dworet will collaborate on the latter. Beer is also showrunning Netflix’s “The Magic Order,” a series based on Mark Millar’s comic.
“With female characters, I always get the note that they need to be ‘likable,’” Beer has said. “A female character can’t have a chip on her shoulder the way a man can. We have so many lovable male protagonists that are the grumpy antihero, but that character as a woman is hard to push through.”
