Briefly: In 2009 Universal and Atari partnered to begin the process of developing a movie based on Asteroids, one of the very earliest classic arcade video games. (Or, more properly, Universal won an auction to the rights and Atari took the studio’s money.) There is no story in the game at all — players control a small ship that has to blast its way to safety (which never comes) through a field of giant asteroids.
Appropriately for a big sci-fi film with little story, Roland Emmerich was loosely attached to Asteroids for a while, but ultimately passed and decided to make Singularity for Sony instead. But Universal is going forward with the movie, and has just hired Evan Spiliotopoulos (Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, Battle for Terra, and perhaps most crucial, some work on Snow White and the Huntsman and Wanted 2) to write a new draft.
All we’ve got with respect to plot is that the movie might feature ” two estranged brothers that must team up to save Earth from an alien race.” That seems like it came out of the Matt Lopez draft that got things moving at Universal. [THR]
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Good news: Roland Emmerich passed on a big sci-fi project. But there’s no news here about the director deciding not to do an adaptation of Isaac Asimov‘s classic sci-fi novel series Foundation, alas. Instead he has passed on the sci-fi film for which is is exceptionally well-suited: a big-screen story inspired by Atari’s game Asteroids.
Emmerich was linked to Asteroids last year, but now as he promotes his Shakespeare conspiracy film Anonymous (which is actually garnering no small praise at TIFF) the director says he decided to skip the Atari film in favor of making Singularity, a sci-fi film picked up by Sony earlier this year, and about which we know relatively little. Read More »
Of course someone wants Roland Emmerich to direct a film based (probably very very loosely) on the classic video game Asteroids. Nothing else would make sense. We’ve known for some time that Atari wanted to make a film using the game license, and two years ago the rights to do so went to Universal. The studio hasn’t done much with it, at least in a public sense. All those Hasbro movies took priority. (Note to Atari: get tougher lawyers when signing licensing deals.)
But now there is a report that Asteroids, the movie based on a game about blowing up rocks, has been offered to Roland Emmerich, famous for blowing up, well, everything. Read More »
In this episode of the /Filmcast, David Chen, Devindra Hardawar and Adam Quigley find out what this whole Mumblecore deal is all about, try to write the plot of the new Asteroids film, assess the career and etymology of Nimrod Antal, discuss the look of Public Enemies, and get excited about the trailers of Jennifer’s Body and The Informant. Special guest Dan Trachtenberg joins us from the Totally Rad Show.
You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us next Monday at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review Bruno.
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When movie studios are developing big budget big screen movies based on Stretch Armstrong and Candyland, I knew it was only a matter of time before Hollywood started to mine some of the classic video games of the children of the 70′s/80′s. Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to win the film rights to the classic Atari video game Asteroids. Newcomer Matthew Lopez, who came out of Disney’s writing program and did work on Bedtime Stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Race to Witch Mountain, has been hired to write the screen adaptation.
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