Universal outbid three other studios for the rights to make a film version of Atari’s 1979 arcade classic Asteroids – a video game with no plot and no characters aside from a little space ship that blows up space rocks.
This film script is to be written by Matthew Lopez (Race to Witch Mountain) and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Other film versions of plot-less games Universal plans to make are Battleship and Candyland.
Has Hollywood lost all desire to make anything entirely original? It seems that it has gotten to the point that the studios slap a known title on a movie and – voila! – the billions roll in. Winning formula, huh?
Even as a fan of the cartoons and comic books I grew up with (like X-Men, Transformers, and many others) the nastalgia-thing in Hollywood is really going too far. At this point, the movie industry seems to be getting reduced to nothing but popular titles and fan-placation.
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“Has Hollywood lost all desire to make anything entirely original?”
Let’s be fair: since Asteroids has, as you say, no plot, no characters, and the only the sketchiest of visual images (its “vector” display offered simple outline drawings of spaceships and asteroids), these things will have to be invented. Therefore a feature film based on the game will be almost entirely original. (Unless it steals ideas from other sources.)