Spy Hunter is back on the road over at Universal. Variety is reporting that Paul WS Anderson has dragged the stalled videogame adaptation back out of development hell.
The film was originally supposed to be directed by John Woo and star The Rock. It actually got fairly well along in pre-production before the whole thing fell apart. There was even a teaser poster (look right). It was, and still is based on the Midway videogame of the same name. The game, which was a lot of fun in 1988, had all the plot complexity of a Pong match and relied mostly on shooting things. Players drove a heavily armed 2-D car along a 2-D road shooting machine gun bullets into whatever got in their way and occasionally taking pit-stops in a mobile power-up truck. There really wasn’t much more to it than that.
The movie version will be fleshed out into a spy movie about a secret agent and his super-powered vehicle battling a shadowy terrorist organization known as Nostra. It’s not known whether The Rock will still play the lead or not. We do know that Paul “not the good one” Anderson is writing it as well as directing it, which is basically the double kiss of death.
