A 'Hello Kitty' Movie Is Being Penned By 'Transformers: The Last Knight' And 'Chaos Walking' Writer

With Aggretsuko tearing up the small screen, Sanrio is set to dominate the big screen too with a Hello Kitty movie adaptation. The ubiquitous Sanrio brand is being adapted into a feature film by New Line, which has just tapped the Hello Kitty movie writer. Lindsey Beer, whose credits include Transformers: The Last Knight and the upcoming YA film Chaos Walking, has been set to write Hello Kitty, the movie based on the adorable toy merchandise.

Deadline broke the news that Beer has been tapped to write Hello Kitty, based on the Sanrio pop culture brand that graces cute toys, keychains, and pencil boxes everywhere. The plot details are being kept under wraps for now, but the outlet notes that the film will be "designed for four quadrant global audience appeal." In other words, it's being built as a merchandising opportunity disguised as a movie. But following the surprising critical success of Sanrio's Netflix series Aggretsuko, I wouldn't completely brush off Hello Kitty.

Created as a cartoon merchandise figure by Sanrio in 1974, the adorable kitten quickly grew in popularity, making her way to the U.S. in 1976 and becoming a globally recognized brand. The character, envisioned as a "a perpetual 3rd-grade student who lives outside London," adorns school supplies, fashion accessories, clothing, and more, and has been the subject of manga and anime films, and even has a theme park dedicated to her. It's easy to imagine the Hello Kitty film acting as a blatant marketing technique, but New Line has managed to tap a rising screenwriter — Beer's credits include Sony's Masters of the Universe, Lionsgate's The Kingkiller Chronicles and Paramount's Transformers: The Last Knight, and she is the creator and writer on Netflix's Mark Millar comic book adaptation The Magic Order with executive producer James Wan. She also recently wrote and executive produced Netflix's hit film Sierra Burgess Is A Loser and has been hired to co-write the female-centric spinoff of Universal's Fast & Furious.

Beer's skills, combined with the unexpected greatness of Aggretsuko, gives me pause on discounting a Hello Kitty film. Netflix's anime series based on the fellow Sanrio property Aggretsuko, a cute red panda with a passion for death metal, is surprisingly profound and deftly written, and a Hello Kitty movie could potentially achieve the same results. At the very least, there will be some very cute merch that comes out of it.