In news that really shouldn’t surprise us, because Hollywood comes up with stuff ten times stupider than this on a daily basis, Universal has announced plans to turn the classic arcade shoot-‘em-up, Asteroids, into a big-budget tentpole.
Yes, that’s right. Asteroids, the incredibly simplistic game where a lone spaceship defends Earth from big bulky rocks, is going to become a movie. A real movie, with actors in it and sets and cameras recording the actors and the sets and everything.
Now, we may scoff, but this thing does have some potential to make a fairly decent wham-bam actioner along the lines of Armageddon. So much so that four studios – four – were bidding for the rights from Atari.
Universal, obviously, won that battle (which, sadly, didn’t come in the form of a King Of Kong style Asteroids face-off) and has placed the property in the care of Transformers’ Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a man who knows a thing or two about taking seemingly tricky properties and turning them into audience catnip.
That said, we’re a little sorry for the poor bastard who has to try to forge a compelling narrative and characters out of a couple of blurry lines going bleep bleep at each other. And that poor bastard is Matthew Lopez, the in-demand writer behind Race To Witch Mountain, Bedtime Stories and The Sorceror’s Apprentice. We wish him all the best – still, at the very least, the research is going to be fun.