With movie marketing just grasping at the straws, its amazing to find out what properites are being shopped for adaptation to the big screen. Video Games have always been a well of fail to dip into, and yet they keep going back. So here’s a novel idea! Go back FARTHER!!
Seems that the WB is trying to secure the film rights to the game that started the arcade craze back in ’78. Space Invaders.
Warner Bros. is negotiating to acquire feature rights to the landmark shooter from Taito, the Japanese company that originally manufactured the game. If the rights issues all work out, the project would bring on Hollywood fixtures Mark Gordon, Jason Blum and Guymon Casady as producers.
They are also considering making Missle Command (Fox) and Asteroids (Universal) at competing studios, so its only appropriate that WB would try to snatch up their own classic video game franchise to make a vaguely connected movie for.
Really, all these studios can hope for is to take some completely unrelated script with some original idea that has some shred of comparison to it and then tweak it to have some ties to the concept to market the living crap out of it with a heavy dose of nostalgia for these arcade classics.
How else is that interesting but unproduced Alien Invasion script going to get made into a film? Right… we make it the Space Invaders movie, and boom! Permission to print money.
So while there is this little camp of “there is nothing original left in Hollywood” is chanting try to see past the marketing and realize they will HAVE to write completely original and interesting scripts for these movies. They have nothing else to go on.
