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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
So in other words, they already made this movie and it was called Armageddon.
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
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!