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Universal Lands Rights To Asteroids Movie
It seems Universal Studios has won the highly sought-after movie rights to the 1979 Atari game Asteroids. Disney's Matthew Lopez will be writing the adaptation, having previously worked on the scripts for Bedtime Stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Race to Witch Mountain. The NY Times is skeptical about Hollywood's ability to do right by the 30-year-old game, already imagining what a director like Michael Bay would do with it: "In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro."
A movie about a triangle flying around blowing up jagged looking circles?
:D /sarcasm
Sounds like a winner to me!!!
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Michael Bay would do with it: "In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another ...
Asteroids crashing into each other ... possibly causing BAYSPLOSIONS!?
P.S. I feel a little guilty re-using the same thing from last week but you know what they say--fight fire with fire!
My work here is dung.
Man, I was seriously just thinking about how great/stupid it would be to make a game out of asteroids last night. Seriously, the game had no story line, so you could be as creative as you wanted, but the movie would likely have NOTHING to do with the game other than the title and a few really crappy circumstances to call for a ship blowing up asteroids.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
sarcasm on - because we all know how badly we want to make sure that the movie stays true to the plot of the source material. We need it to be authentic, with genuine pew pew pew pew noises, white noise explosions, and the fearsome vector line asteroids. Uwe Boll would have screwed that ALL up.
Do they really need a license to make an asteroid movie? Wouldn't it pretty much look exactly like the asteroid scene from Attack of the Clones?
I mean, really, really lame? Even an action scene where they're having to blast oncoming rocks for any time longer than 10 seconds will be overkill. It's not that I have no appreciation for the game, I played it in the 80's (the home version I rolled over the score twice in the same game while I had chicken pox).
There are many better games to make movies from. (Deus Ex, Thief, Zelda, Golden Axe, heck - even Pitfall or Pac Man would be better).
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
I could make a box office killing filming myself getting rid of centipedes in my backyard, using a BB gun.
Now to go and secure the rights.....
That was a good movie idea when it was called Deep Impact.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Coming soon to a theater near you...PONG!
Are we talking about the game where you had a little ship and you blew up computerized rocks? This would be the game with absolutely no back story, no plot, no "end game"....
On second thought, this sounds exactly like a Hollywood classic.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This. Simply. Cannot. Be. Serious.
turing word: cometary
(damn it may actually be serious.)
You reduce the rocks to a minimal interference then shoot as many UFO's as you can.
http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Asteroids/Walkthrough
So this is going to be a space battle movie.
Actualy, I think they are going to blow it. Make space really small and have a dense set of rocks and lots of collisions.
I bet the real money's gonna come from the iPhone app based on the movie.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Hey, if it's half as good as Tetris: The Movie I'll probably go see it.
I'll go watch Apatow get stoned before I'd see Transformers 2, so at least one of those movies sounds like a money maker to me.
Somebody buying the right, or someone concern about doing "right by the 30-year-old game,".
Seriously, doing right? it's a fucking shoot the rocks line drawn game. Don't get me wrong, I dropped plenty of money in the machine and had a good time playing it, but please.
I wuold love to see Bay do this movie. Maybe a story about a team that's supposed to clear the way for the minug crew. ON the way some bad ass aliens decide to blow them up, and they ahve to outsmart them.
It could just eb an alien shoot em up; which can be a fun movie.
Or a bunch of earth killer asteroids are coming toward us, so several crew ahve to go up and 'clear a path'.
That would sell. I wouldn't see it, but many people would.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They'd have to change their revenue model, though. Instead of walking up to the movie theater and paving $10 (or more) for a ticket to watch ALL of the movie, you pay $.25 and then get to watch the first 3 minutes of the movie. Want more movie? Pay another quarter. And another. And another. And another.
There, that'd REALLY replicate the experience of Asteroids on the big-screen.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Twenty or twenty-five years ago, I would've been excited for a vector-based CGI feature film. (The smoothness of vector graphics motion was unparalleled. I loved my Vectrex!)
Geeze, guys, this is amazingly old news. Big, expensive movie about rocks that'll crash into each other unless they get blown up? I loved it when it came out the first time... when it was called Armageddon. And Deep Impact.
If this gets made into a movie before something like Enders Game, I'm giving up completely on HollyWood.
I'm tired of seeing horrible movie after horrible movie come out, when there are fantastic stories waiting to be made into great movies (or, be done horribly, I'll concede).
Video game movies just don't work.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Just as long as they don't make a movie out of that ET the Extra-Terrestrial Atari game. That one sucked!
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
I mean Turtorro was probably one of the better parts of Transformers 2. He was hysterical in my opinion. "I'm directly below the enemies testicles"
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Bruce Willis: More english! More english! Yeeeeaaaahh....
[Bruce leaps to safety as paddle explodes in fireball]
Hollywood is really stuck for ideas. They've used up all the classic fables. They've used up the better cartoon characters. They've gone though the action figures. ("Transformers 2?" Coming up next, "GI Joe") The better video games have been done.
Every once in a while there's a successful original ("Up" being the latest example) but that's rare.
Windows Solitaire.
No, but my dad does.
He can't even sit on the toilet some days.
(The movie reference really does not need to be specified here.)
You know, with odds like this the popcorn fun will come from watching how badly it bombs at box office.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Legend of the Red Dragon, of course. It could be the only movie where the badass hero gets a vd from the babe.
Actually, maybe that wouldn't make a good movie either.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Mainstream Hollywood ran out of original ideas for movies quite some time ago. When? When they started turning to old, bad TV sitcoms and video games for movie ideas. This one? Got to be bottom of the barrel. I loved playing Asteroids and all, but this is NOT movie plot material! What's worse? It'll probably have the living SHIT marketed out of it, and they'll push for an Imax 3D release of it. I'm going to go puke now..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Instead of Asteroids, they should do Star Raiders, or maybe think outside of the "lets turn a video game into a movie" box that they're in, and make a movie of an actual story. The Ruum, or Gottlos could make a decent movie. Perhaps some of Saberhagen's Berserker stuff, or LeGuin's Dragonriders of Pern, or Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I guess the problem is that today's movie executives grew up watching TV, playing video games, and reading comic books, instead of visiting a library.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why would they need to buy the rights? Why wouldn't they be able to just make a movie about a ship shooting up asteroids?
Hell, it's been done in Star Wars already, and the Star Destroyers already vaguely look like the "Asteroids" ship.
It will be great. You'll probably be in a ship in space shooting rogue asteroids.
There's no real way to make ender's game into a movie sadly simply due to the fact that real children are too fucking stupid (even the best child actors too) to be able to pull off the range of adult emotions and adult style scenes in the Ender's Game series of books.
They did a pretty damned good job with Wing Commander :)
Ok. Try to come up with a video game - any video game - that would have a dumber movie premise. Go ahead. There are plenty of posts about this with people saying "no way this has to be a joke". So let's try to top Hollywood here. Let's try to come up with something even dumber. Classic arcade or modern game, doesn't matter.
We've already seen Pong in this thread. That's a good one. Post more like that. Something dumber than Asteroids: The Movie.
If you can.
I'll start the bidding with Marble Madness.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
When was the last time a creative movie came from Hollywood? A regurgitation of a tired cliches with spectacular effects and spin-off trinkits is more likely. The hero, a (wo)?man who overcame unjust adversity, saves the day by combining natural talent with dogged individuality while wearing ray-bans and drinking red bull.
sigh.
I see no reason to assume that your childhood is representative of everyone's.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Imagine what Kubrick, rest his soul, could do with these rights. There would be wide shots of asteroid fields, set to Strauss - with a 4 and a half hour run time, all of it filmed in natural light, where the asteroids hitting each other come to represent the extensional angst of human interaction with each other, where the main characters fracture and come apart slightly, just like the rocks.
The end could be a 20 minute pyrotechnic hallucination, where we - the viewer - no longer understand if the little ship or the rocks themselves are the protgaganist - Haley Joel Osment could stand in as a lost teenager, piloting the ship - never knowing why he is shooting the rocks, or even if he is human. On the side of his ship is painted the words "Me love you long time...", being both a metaphor and a literal phrase of what the ship is doing to the rocks.
Later, we found out that a secret sex cult has arranged the rocks to bang into each other for the pleasure of its sadistic members, who wear masks shaped like big asteroids. Lee Ermey marches in and screams "what is your major malfunction, did mommy and daddy not show you enough love?" to the cult. and of course, the movie ends with a Malcom McDowell voiceover while we see Jack Nicholson frozen in place on the asteroid surface.
Oh Stanley - had you only been here to do it!
In this $300 million, three-and-a-half hour spectacle, loud and expensive computer simulations of large boulders crashing into one another are briefly interrupted by the hilarious antics of Chip and Gravel, two living rocks with gold teeth who speak in hip-hop slang, and the nonstop shouting of John Turturro.
And the problem with this would be... what? It's a frigging video game, for gods' sake!
Hey, Hollywood:
I'll sell you the right to PONG for $2.5 million.
That is sure to be a box-office hit too.
Can't possibly be better than Minesweeper : The Movie! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs
My website
I'm fine with this, just as long as they don't mess with the score. I can't wait for 2 hours of that!
This guy's the limit!
Any movie would have to work hard to be funnier than Eddie Murphy as "Eddie Asteroids" with Joe Piscopo on Saturday Night Live.
I keep thinking boobs shaped astroids bouncing off each other and a ship shaped like a penis...
The story is told from the point-of-view of the spacecraft's pilot. But it's a two-dimensional universe, so the pilot sees nothing, because the lines he's looking at have no depth.
Let's grant some creative license and assume that the lines can be seen by the pilot. His field of view is just a line, with line segments on it. He needs to rotate around, looking at line segments. If a line segment appears to be getting longer over time, it could mean that an asteroid is approaching, or it could be that the larger part of an asteroid is just rotating into view. He fires at it, and the line segment breaks into two line segments, one of which is getting bigger, but drifting to the right, while the other gets smaller and smaller, apparently receding. Or, maybe they're entirely different objects, it's hard to tell.
The pilot pushes the thrust button. Some of the line segments shift their positions, some get longer, some get shorter. He realizes that moving around just makes things more difficult to keep track of, and that it's better to stay in one place and rotate quickly. But it's a lesson that's come too late; he's moving, and it's hard to stop. He could spin around 180 degrees and try to slowly thrust to a stop, but that means losing vision in the direction he's moving for too long. So he lays into the rotation control and starts firing blindly. That, too, is a bad move; soon the line segments are everywhere. And now, because there is so much variety in their absolute sizes, it's impossible to tell how close each one actually is. It might be a small one about to smash into him, or it might be a big one far away.
Suddenly, two line segments of about equal size converge. But they don't appear to be a threat because the converged segment is moving harmlessly to the right. Suddenly, the segment becomes two, and the truth becomes sickeningly clear: an asteroid moving laterally past his field of vision was concealing another asteroid coming right at him. He tries to rotate into firing position, but it's too late. He's only been on the board for ten excruciating seconds, but at last his mission is over.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I happen to like FF: TSW, DOA: DOA, Resident Evil series and Lara Croft...
Didn't watch the others?
Awhile back a guy did a game from the perspective of the Asteroid, it was pretty funny, and actually pretty fun:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/AdamSchroeder/asteroids-revenge-iii-crash-to-survive
If there's one game that is completely geared for the average Hollywood scriptwriter, it's Asteroids.
(Background noise: bommmmp bommmmp bommmp)
SHIP: Pew pew pew!
ASTEROID: BOOM! CRASH!
SHIP: Pew pew pew pew pew!
ASTEROID: BANG! BAM! BOOM!
SHIP: Pew pew pew!
ASTEROID: BOOMF! BOOM! KERBLOOIE!
(Background noise increases pace: bomp bomp bomp bomp)
UFO: Wooo Ooo Ooo Ooo Ooo!
SHIP: Woosh! Pew pew pew! Woosh!
UFO: Wooo Ooo Ooo! Pewwww! Pewwww! Woo Ooo!
SHIP: Pew! Woosh! Pew pew! Woosh! Pew!
(Background noise even faster: bop bop bop bop bop bop)
UFO: Wooo Ooo Ooo! BOOM!
SHIP: Woosh! Pew pew! BOOM!
(William Shatner delivers soliloquy on the pointlessness of war and violence)
(End credits: GAME OVER!)
It's about mutherfuckin' ASTEROIDS in mutherfuckin' SPACE!
I wonder what the given tie-in video game will be like.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Agreed, even the New Testament played it to death:). But tracing isn't drawing, even when it looks better.
Stop raping my childhood!
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
If ever there is a lull in the action, that goddamn mini-UFO will be all over the protagonist!
I'm currently entertaining offers for a biopic of my navel lint. This one has sequel written all over it.
I was going to suggest Desert Bus, but they already made Speed, so I guess Hollywood beat me to it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Whenever a story appears on both sites, I see it on the Fark headlines before I see it on /.
When I was in my early teens (1982) and the movie "Tempest" came out, I remember a slightly younger kid in an arcade telling me, "It's nothing like the video game!"
I had to suppress laughter. Back then, the name of the movie did catch my eye, but I also knew the word meant "storm," so I figured it was a chick flick. Poor kid, hahahaha!
Asteroids the movie sounds lame to me, but you never know. If it had Larry the Cable Guy, the plot would involve foam rubber donuts...
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh please don't!
All of you are assuming "action movie" but I could totally see this work as a really weird comedy. Picture Will Farell as a down on his luck fighter pilot charged with clearing asteroid fields out of the way of their fleet mothership. Add lots and lots of 80's video games references (humourously presented of course) and you got yourself the next geek sleeper hit!
A two dimensional movie with no real plot but a huge amount of things blowing up? An overpowered spaceship destroying everything that moves and stands on it's way for no reason? A movie with 100% pure action and 0% human interaction? Welcome to Hollywood!
You can't make Ender's game unless you do it animated. Imagine a movie about young children (5-9 year olds) with one or two adults in the whole thing that is as bloody and violent and stuff as what Card originally wrote. They'll either turn it into Spy Kids vs. Buggers or they'll bump up the ages of everyone to high school age and then cast a bunch of young twentysomethings to play the characters. Think Shia Labouf as "18 year old" Ender Wiggin.
No, Ender's Game, if it is ever made, needs to be a totally CGI movie, and ideally it'd be 3D for those battle room scenes (imagine the vertigo of "the enemy gate is down" in digital 3D). Sadly, if they ever do it they'll fuck it up even worse than they fucked up Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
This is ridiculous. If it's made(and I hope it isn't) if Michael Bay produces it, it'll be retarded. Not gonna watch this.
Scroll through towards the end of this video that went online today - http://snipurl.com/mgrt7