THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE: Rovio cuts 260 Employees, Film Crew Untouched

Rovio cut 260 jobs to reduce workforce, film still moving forward. There was a time when Angry Birds was one of the most iconic video games next to Mario and Pokémon. Almost everybody had one interpretation of the game and even played it to pass the time. Sadly, those days are long gone and it is starting to take effect.

Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds and other games like Plunder Pirates, had to cut 260 jobs in order to downsize the company, leaving them with 110 employees. This is extremely painful for Rovio in comparison to how it was doing during the peak of Angry Birds back in the end of 2013, when it employed 800 workers in London, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Tokyo, Stockholm, Shanghai, Seoul and in its headquarters in Espoo, Finland. To many, this came as a surprise, since the sequel of the game, Angry Birds 2, got downloaded 50 million times. It seems that those numbers weren’t big enough to sustain Rovio’s previous employee roster, especially since the amount of downloads are already plummeting.

At this point, some may ask, “What does this have to do with movies? Why are we talking about video games here?” Well, the reason why I brought this up is because the company now has only one hope to save itself…The Angry Birds Movie. In a collaboration between Rovio and Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, the representatives of Rovio stated that the job cuts will not affect the workers on the animated feature, since those workers are from Sony. The budget of the movie is already estimated at approximately $180 million with $80 million going into the production and the rest going to marketing and distribution.

The fate of Rovio may rest in the hands of The Angry Birds Movie when it will be released on May 20, 2016.

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