Universal to Bombard us with an ‘Asteroids’ Movie

Published by Jeff Leins on: July 2nd, 2009

Something happened to movies in the past few decades where good ideas started to disappear.  Characters played by solid actors have given way to special effects and CGI.  You don’t see a mega action hero like Arnold Schwarzenegger anymore or even an A-list star like Tom Cruise drawing crowds.  It’s all about recognizing the nostalgia in the flimsy source, not the talent involved in adapting it.

When studios began risking hundreds of millions on blockbuster titles, they minimized potential disasters by churning out sequels and adapting well-known properties.  It has worked for quite a while, selling it back to the public as more of what they paid to see before.  Comic books and video games dominated the silver screen until the major names were squeezed.  Then studios moved to toys, cartoons, and board game movies.  Which brings us to the next bad idea: Arcade games.  Because it worked so well with Street Fighter, right?

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures is bringing the Atari game Asteroids to the big screen. That’s right, the same studio willing to turn Candyland and Stretch Armstrong into the next marketable movie is steering the controls on this new, plot-free game-to-movie.  What’s worse is they won a four studio bidding war for this crap, meaning other companies thought “Oh man, we have to buy that!”  Lorenzo di Bonaventura (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) is producing.

I thought Universal would just grab a science fiction script and change the name, but I guess I was wrong.  Newcomer Matthew Lopez (The Sorceror’s Apprentice) has been tasked with turning the 30-year-old game about a spinning spaceship shooting rocks into an epic adventure for all ages.  Hopefully he does a good job because we wouldn’t want Nicolas Cage looking silly again (you know he’ll be all over this).  Michael Bay, Universal will be calling you to make basically Armageddon 2.  Don’t worry, it has explosions.