Pictured above: cinematic gold!
One of Hollywood's more perplexing trends right now is snatching up the movie rights to things that don't seem to have any inherent "movie-ready" concept. The Magic 8-Ball is getting a movie. Hasbro's Battleship game is getting a movie. "But wait," I hear you counter, "battleships are awesome." Sure, but literally the only thing Battleship as a property brings to the table is, well, battleships. And those red pegs, I guess. Why not just make an original movie about battleships? It all comes down to name recognition, which is why you can almost certainly look forward to upcoming adaptations of Candyland, Chutes 'n' Ladders, and Lite-Brite ("When everything seems hopeless...step into the Lite."). And then, of course, there's Asteroids.
How the hell do you make a movie out of a 1970s Atari game that involved nothing more than spinning in circles and shooting poorly rendered space rocks (and the occasional flying saucer)? Well, Universal seems to have latched onto the "flying saucer" part. A new article in THR says that the video-game adaptation will be the story of " two estranged brothers that must team up to save Earth from an alien race." You know, all that stuff you remember so well from the game. Oh well, at least the addition of aliens is less arbitrary in Asteroids than it is in Battleship.
Matt Lopez (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) previously worked on the script, but now Universal has hired Evan Spiliotopoulos to take a stab at it. He just finished reimagining a classic fairy tale in Snow White and the Huntsman (you can see the first trailer for that one right here). Before that, he's worked on a ton of shitty direct-to-video Disney animated movies such as Pooh's Heffalump Halloween Movie and Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. I guess that makes him as qualified to wring cash out of Asteroids as anybody.
