With Battleship set to open on May 18, it would seem that Universal is full steam ahead (*tugboat horn*) with the threat of producing a series of films based on Hasbro games. However, as we learned last year, the threat is dying. First, Universal killed Clue in the board room with the red pen, and then the studio gently pushed its McG-helmed Ouija Board movie into the dumpster.

Now, as if the gods have heard our cries for salvation, Universal has also dropped its Stretch Armstrong movie that was not only going to be in 3D, but would have starred Taylor Lautner. That’s right, it was the perfect storm of elastic crap.

So why the toe tag, Universal?

The Tay-Tay camp is claiming “it was our choice” to pull out of the film, but in fact a project insider told Deadline months ago right after Lautner’s Lionsgate film Abduction bombed that the studio was rethinking the project with Lautner as star but that Hasbro would make the final decision on the status of the project. Looks like that has happened. (Via Deadline)

First of all, Tay-Tay? That’s just asinine. No grown adult covering any topic should ever refer to someone as Tay-Tay unless it’s a panda baby.

As for the film, we can’t get too excited. Relativity Media is cleaning up Universal’s sloppy seconds by teaming with Hasbro to get this movie done. The good thing is that it won’t star Lautner and maybe Universal has learned a very important lesson here.

Battleship is rumored to have cost Universal $200 million to produce, and if that’s true, the producers of Water World must be celebrating right now. There should be no way in hell that a film starring Liam Neeson and Rihanna could make that kind of money back, but stranger things have happened. Either way, this is a nice moral victory.

Let’s all enjoy it for now, until Boo Boo Stewart is cast as the lead in Slinky.