Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Asteroids Movie

Asteroids MovieUniversal has bought the movie rights to Asteroids. Yep, they want to bring the famous arcade game to the big screen! Asteroids was first released by Atari in 1979. The object of the game was to shoot and destroy asteroids and flying saucers while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game didn't have any extensive mythology, but managed to become hugely popular.

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (the producer behind the Transformers movie series is on board the movie adaptation of Asteroids. He explains how he came to the project:

"When I was called about the property - I was called because of what I'd done with 'Transformers' and 'G.I. Joe.' Atari reached out to me and said, 'We have Asteroids,' and I had an immediate reaction 'Yes.' The reason was not because playing the game, we thought somehow that game could be translated into a movie, it can't. The word 'Asteroids' connotates a large-scale experience, so the challenge, which was great, was 'Okay, so how do you get a mythology that will support that?" We really went after a mythology on the level of 'Star Wars' and we'll see if we succeeded or not but it's not a simple thing of the asteroids are going to hit the earth. We never come to earth. The entire movie takes place in the asteroid field. We do some homages to the game for sure, but I like the sense of scale."
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura


Scriptwriter Matt Lopez (who worked on The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Race to Witch Mountain) has been hired to pen the screenplay of the movie Asteroids. But the project is still at an early stage. We'll probably have to wait a few years before production really starts.

Anyway, do you have any suggestion regarding the script of this Asteroids movie?
:)