Universal Wants You To Bend Over And Take It Up The Asteroids
By George 'El Guapo' Roush on
July 02, 2009
One of my favorite places to eat at when I was a kid growing up in San Jose was Shakey's Pizza. Not because I liked the pizza, but because they had an Asteroids game that I could play all day long. I loved the dexterity involved and the fact that you could just thrust your ship straight up and rack up the points as you continue to shoot down the little flying saucer when it appeared on screen.
But I never imagined anyone could make a movie out of it. I mean, it's Asteroids. There's no story to it, so this game to movie adaptation could be about anything. What's next, Galaga?
The trades has more: Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
In "Asteroids," initially released as an arcade game in 1979, a player controlled a triangular space ship in an asteroid field. The object was to shoot and destroy the hulking masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both.
As opposed to today's games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch. Universal, however, is used to that development process, as it's in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as "Battleship" and "Candyland."
Senior vp of production Jeff Kirschenbaum will oversee the project for Universal.
Di Bonaventura's next outing is "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," which Paramount is set to open Aug. 7.
Lopez came out of Disney's writing program and worked on that studio's recent movies "Bedtime Stories" and "Race to Witch Mountain." He also wrote the most recent draft of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," currently in production with Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel starring.
Lopez and Atari are repped by ICM.
Universal may want to go with someone else besides Matthew Lopez. Bedtime Stories and Race to Witch Mountain were total shit movies with a horrible script, (don't know about Sorcerer's Apprentice yet) so I have no idea how this guy keep getting work. And since all he's done are kid's movies, is Universal going to make this movie for children? Today's youth have never even heard of the game Asteroids, so why hire a guy that has only written (poorly) movies for kids?
Surprise us all and just make it 90 minutes of this:
