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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.
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.....
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!
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
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."
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
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
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!
The Preview:
"In a world gone mad..."
Bruce: There are two sides to this!
Samuel L. Jackson: Dammit, I know how to play the game!
"People cry out for justice..."
Vin Diesel: When it comes at you, you better be ready.
Uma Thurman: I'll send it right back at them!
"and there is only one way to turn..."
Patrick Stewart: Is there any point to this back and forth?
Joe Pesci: The point is to win, and I hate to lose.
[action music, explosions, car chases, screen fades to black]
Pong! (comming this summer to a theater near you)
[boop... boop... be-boop...]
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?