Heroes' Hiro, Masi Oka, has sold a pitch to DreamWorks called The Defenders, an idea that perhaps shares a little creative DNA wtih Heroes but which sounds rather promising. It's pitched as a family film, but one more in line with "the kind of movies Amblin used to do", ie The Goonies and the like.
The idea is that a group from around the world, chiefly comprised of teenagers, are involved in an online role-playing game but have no other contact with one another. When danger threatens, however, they have to unite in the real world - and perhaps become Hiros heroes in the process.
Oka, who's got more geek cred than all the rest of us put together, came up with the idea while playing online role-playing games. "You can be whoever you want to be," he said. "The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?"
He pitched it to screenwriter/producers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), who liked the idea, and it's now being set up with D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye) set to direct and Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli, the mooted Akira remake) writing the script. Whitta apparently bonded with Oka over their shared love of World of Warcraft, so you might call this a match made in Gnomeregan.
So while we're hoping the results don't turn out like Eagle Eye, we feel like there are some promising signs here. The world needs another Goonies, even if this time the Goonies are all too busy being Death Knights to lead normal lives.