Yes, you read that correctly; there’s going to be a movie about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The concept was picked up by Fox Searchlight, the Disney-owned studio responsible for Oscar-winning films like 12 Years A Slave, The Shape of Water, and Slumdog Millionaire. It will be directed by, of all people, Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria. Will this be the worst thing ever? Could this perhaps be the unholy followup to the corporate diarrhea that was Emoji Movie? Will rapper Lil 🦂Xan publicly denounce the movie ?
Well, for starters, the premise doesn’t sound nearly as awful as it should. While most probably imagined some animated abomination in which Chester Cheetah quested to protect the world from non-Cheetos based snack products, it’s actually going to be a biopic about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos inventor Richard Montanez. The son of a Mexican immigrant who grew up on a farm outside of Los Angeles in the 60s, his story is much more compelling than most would think. It’ll be much more like The Founder, the story of McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc, than Mac and Me, the 1988 E.T. rip-off whic🥂h featured a poorly-choreographed dance sequence in a McDonald’s restaurant.
That said, we should all be wondering the same thing at the moment: will there be a Flam🥃in’ Hot Cheetos movie tie-in game?
No, obviously not. Tie-in games went out of style quite some time ago,🐲 and, unless Cheetos plans to revive the heydays of Wii shovelware, we sho⛎uldn’t be expecting anything. Yet, it’s been quite a while since we’ve gotten a video game based on Chester Cheetah, and, while that sounds ridiculous, there could be some interesting marketing opportunities in that idea.
The only major Cheetos-based video game ever released was the 1992’s SNES tour-de-force Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool. Made to promote the paw-shaped Cheetos snacks which absolutely nobody remembers today, Too Cool To Fool was a platformer made by developers who looked at a screenshot of Mario Bros. on the NES and thought they alre𓆉ady knew everything they needed to know about game design. It’s slow, monotonou🧸s, and weirdly impossible, yet it’s almost worth checking out just for the oddity of it all.
But, when will we get a sequel? Or, at the very least, another Cheetos๊ based video game. It may seem improbable, but, if Bubsy the Bobcat can make a comeback, could Chester Cheetah really be all that far behind.
Unfortunately, if anything, we may get one of those really run-of-the-mill mobile games which are sometimes produced to promote movies. Jurassic Park, Despicable Me, and Batman: The Dark Knight Rises all had mobile tie-in games, and one based on the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos movie isn’t totally out of the question. Plus, Cheetos actually partnered with some mobile developer known as Fifth Dimension to release a really simple AR game called Cheetos Flames of the World in India back𒈔 in 2015. We could get someth🎶ing like that.
What we really want to see, however, is something akin to what Burger King did in the late 2000s with their wacky Xbox 360 games. Everyone remembers Sneak King, PocketBike Racer, and the all-time classic Big Bumpin’. No? Alright, then.
The point here is that video games and unhealthy foodstuffs have been hand in hand since the Atari 2600 days, and what better way to keep the tradition alive than by putting out an outlandishly stupid tie-in Cheetos game to coincide with the release of Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot Cheetos movie. What's that, you✨ say? You wish the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 had actually happened? Yeah, us too.