Ugh: Zynga’s Farmville in talks for movie treatment

As annoying as it is to get Farmville requests from friends on Facebook, now there may be no way to escape the popular game: Farmville in talks to be made into a movie.

Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen, writers on the classic film Toy Story and decidedly not classic movies Garfield and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, revealed late last week they have been in talks with Farmville-creator Zynga to write an adaptation.

“We’re in conversations with Zynga to do something with one of their brands,” told IGN on Thursday. “Can’t really say too much on that front yet, but ‘Old MacDonald’ didn’t have a factory, if you get our drift.”

We’re not exactly sure what that means, but previous rumors indicated Zynga had reached out to work on a Mafia Wars film based on its popular Mafia-themed game. So it’s no surprise it might be working to develop other content based on its immensely popular games.

Farmville launched on Facebook in June 2009 and became one of Zynga’s first big hits. The game’s a little older now but still counts more than 35 million users. Comparably, Zynga’s Cityville has had more than 76 million active monthly users after launching in December 2010.

The goal of Farmville is to build a thriving farm by planting trees, harvesting crops and raising livestock. The social aspect of the game comes from having your Facebook friends as “neighbors” and users being able to send supplies and gifts to each other, among other actions.

A movie would most likely use Farmville as a title for branding purposes, but not necessarily feature any farming-with-friends action. However, it’s not hard to imagine a computer-animated film with talking farm animals coming out of this. If it’s anything like Garfield or Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, however, I’ll be skipping it.