Hat tip to Shakesville:
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.
* * *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.”
Yes, that “Asteroids.” I’ll call this the Transformers effect. You can take anything that is popular, or once was popular, with kids, and make a movie out of it, and it stands a good chance of getting green-lit, because someone will think it stands a good chance of making money. Which is why there was a “four studio bidding war” for the film rights to a thirty-year-old video game that lacked even the semblance of a story.
