With Tomb Raider, Resident Evil as two of the better ones and Max Payne, Hitman and Doom as just a few of the awful ones, Computer game movie adaptations are not going away soon. Okay, I understand it, computer games are a hot item in Hollywood at the moment. They offer large detailed stories, immersive worlds, compelling characters and amazing cinematics for writers and filmmakers to plunder for that next, big holiday popcorn epic. I am also guilty of going to see many of them in the hopes that “Hollywood finally gets it right”.
This brings us to the WTF moment. Of all the great games, past and present, what does Hollywood go crazy for? Halo? Half-Life?? Grand Theft Auto??? Oh come on, it has to be the long planned World of Warcraft movie, doesn’t it???? Nope, how about Asteroids! Wait a minute! Asteroids? The Asteroids, the 1979 Atari arcade game that was basically just a vector graphic line drawing that was really just building on the Lunar Lander model? That Asteroids? Yes, indeed. No story, no plot, no characters and no compelling cinematics. You are a Triangle that shoots blocks from the centre of screen at roughly drawn circles which break apart and become smaller roughly drawn circles.
This is Hollywood madness at its finest. Not only do the studios want the make a film of Asteroids, The Hollywood Reporter reports that they just finished a four studio bidding war for the rights! Universal came out the winner and obtained the movie rights to this compelling property (that’s sarcasm people!) and Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Stardust, Doom, Constantine, Transformers 1 & 2) is producing. From a writers point of view I guess it could be alright, they have a blank slate to work from (more sarcasm!).
I think this can be summed up by Dave Itzkoff of The LA times, I quote, “Proving that there is no relic from our childhood that cannot be turned into an expensive event movie bearing almost no resemblance to the original artifact, The Hollywood Reporter says that Universal has acquired the movie rights to Asteroids, the bleeping, blooping 1979 video game in which crude line drawings were used to represent rocket ships and gigantic space rocks.”
I suppose none of this should come as a surprise though, Universal is the studio that is producing the board game movies Battleship, Candyland, Ouija, Monopoly and the remake of Clue.
For the young ones out there, you might never have played the gripping (even more sarcasm) Asteroids, so as a public service just click below and enjoy. It is not the original, but it is pretty close.
