The man with 30 films somewhere in the production ether has just added another project to his list. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of the Transformers films and the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra feature has dipped his grubby hands once again into the 80s properties pool and won a bidding war- A BIDDING WAR!!! for the rights to make an Asteroids movie. Yes, yes, the game where you, a small triangle, shoot and destroy asteroids of varying shapes and sizes until you are mercilessly crushed by one of them yourself. Insert another quarter and go again!
Now, given that Asteroids was around in the days where back story and characters didn't matter, we were too caught up in the actual state of the art video game action back then, this gives the script writer Matthew Lopez [Bedtime Stories and Race to Witch Mountain... I know] pretty much free reign to do what he wants and create an exciting world around the simple concept of blowing up Asteroids.
So let's theorize and make up our own script shall we? Here's what I can make up off the top of my head. Aliens have redirected asteroids from the belt in orbit around the Sun, that one between Mars and Jupiter, and they are launching them at Earth, hoping to wipe out the human race from a distance. It's up to the Asteroid Defense Human Defenders [ADHD - get it?], a collection of young, hot, thrill seeking space pilots to intercept these Asteroids before they become Meteorites and plunge into the soft recesses of our fragile Earth. They'll be doing some plunging into some soft recesses of their own because they are so young and hot and thrill seeking. Either an Asteroid will get through their defenses, kill millions, and one of the pilots will have this big emotional moment where they torture themselves in grief only get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. Or, one of their pilots will die, planting themselves on the front side of a massive Asteroid, and everyone will have a joined emotional moment then everyone can get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. There will be lots of special effects and lots of explosions [which you must have even though there is no sound in the vacuum of space] and I wouldn't be surprised if it is done in Real 3D. After all, it's Asteroids damnit!
What say you?
Who was it that bought the rights to The Sims a while back? This is worse than that.
Probably not worse than Monopoly, though. I hadn't heard of that one.
I think THE SIMS is far worse and far more gimmicky. Asteroids - the game - is a collection of story elements with no story. You have asteroids, a vaguely triangular spacecraft with a forward firing blaster, an unreliable hyperspace drive, mysterious alien spacecraft shooting at you, and if you want to go all Asteroids Deluxe with it, a time-limited deflector shield. It's as good or as bad as the story you add to it.
What's next, Centipede!? There's plenty of games out there that actually have decent stories like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune which is being made now or Bioshock which unfortunately is on hold. I'm not upset they're making this movie( after all it's not my money being wasted)I'm just baffled there was an actually bidding war over it like it's some hot property. This is an old arcade game and last time I checked those died out years ago in the States. When's the last time anyone played it? Looks to me that the real winner of the bidding war was the game's developer.
By the way Andrew I love your little apoplectic moment over the fact that there was a bidding war for this.
Surely *Sinistar* is a better property. It had a VILLAIN as well as the asteroid thing.
In any case here is my pitch:
"A young asteroid miner seeks to solve the mystery of who or what destroyed the spaceship piloted by his parents in the most dangerous section of the asteroid fields, a tragedy that orphaned him. Dam Cheesweight, now an adult is a rebel miner in a system dominated by a paramilitary corporation who not only must contend with the terrors of deep space but also must fend off pirates and the predatory attentions of the ZUG MEGACORP while seeking to uncover THE TRUTH behind his parent's disappearance. Along the way Dam must ally himself with a beautiful space explorer and free spirit Melinda Humpwright who believes there is something deep within the asteroid fields that holds the key to the origins of life in the universe."
You people are wrong, it's going to involve a missing father, two token black guys as sidekicks and a talking dog.
Andrew & Airchinapilot, you guys better copyright your story because parts of it will probably get stolen word for word in the final script. And undoubtably, there will be the porn spoof "Assteroids" that will follow. :p
Andrew, you're a good scriptwriter ;D lol. I actually can't picture it out, it could be a great movie, it depends on their budget and casting. But if you're going to ask me what movie game I would like to see in cinema, probably it's world of warcraft.
Chevalier: Pac Man is actually in the works. At one point one of the directors of Special was attached as a writer ...
This means we could end up with a Pong movie. I can see it now. PONG: A LOVE STORY. Two manipulative, rival paddles forever trapped in their own y-plane and the lonely pixel ball caught between them, desperately trying to break free.
Didnt Michael Bay already make Asteroids but change the name to Armageddon?
I'm looking forward to when they make a JOUST movie. Knights on ostriches fighting above lava! How is that not the next great summer blockbuster??
The only way I can take these adaptations of games like Asteroids and Pac Man seriously is if these films are about people playing the game.
A few years back the documentary "King of Kong" was pretty successful, and I can imagine someone wanting to make a movie about a guy who wants to break the "Asteroids" world-record, meaning he has to play it for 18-hours straight (no pause-button, remember...).
The same goes for Pac-Man.
And wasn't there a guy who traveled all over the world, visiting arcades to check if someone had ever gotten a higher score in "Crystal Castles" than himself? That is actually a story worth telling I think, especially if the only higher score he ever found would be on a machine somewhere in a pub of a tiny goldmining village deep in the Amazon rainforest...
:cheese:
Hollywood is becoming like pro sports, where studios comb the globe for IP that might be the "next big thing" in the same way teams visit middle and elementary schools for "the next great player."