See this picture?  It’s a still from Atari’s Missile Command.  The object of this game is to use your blue dong thingie (bottom) to shoot the red dong thingies (top) before they destroy your cities.  Can you imagine trying to write a whole screenplay from this scenario? (And you can’t just steal the blue dong stuff from Watchmen, that’s cheating).  That’s the challenge for writers Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama, who’ve been hired to write a Missile Command movie, and it sounds much harder than what that Buried douche was working with.  Well, more pointless anyway.

Atari has set up its “Missile Command” at 20th Century Fox. Sharpless and Sazama are set to adapt. The scribes have little to adapt beyond a title to build a plot around and a Cold War-heavy scenario of players having to defend their cities from being destroyed by a rain of missiles. Game celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.

Game is the third top title that Atari has set up as a film property, after Universal Pictures acquired “Asteroids” and Sony Pictures Animation picked up “Rollercoaster Tycoon.” It also becomes the latest brand from the ’80s to get the bigscreen treatment, with Universal readying a number of toy-based properties from Hasbro, including “Battleship,” and Mattel having set up others, including “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” at Sony and “View-Master” at DreamWorks. [Variety]

My God, this could be the next Prince of Persia, or Max Payne!  Either way, it’s sure to enjoy a high level of name recognition among people too old to care about a movie about missile fights.  Sounds like a win-win.

The prospect of a Pong movie was already raised by FilmDrunk commenters back in August 2007, as the logical conclusion of this retarded trend towards optioning video games, board games, etc.   It was a joke at first, but it’s going to happen, bet on it.  They’re already doing Asteroids, and as of today, Missile Command. At this point it’s like they’re just beating around the bush to screw with us.

Atari, which has been increasing its efforts to mine its video game library in Hollywood, has tapped Missile Command as a property ripe for a theatrical film. The company is in active discussions with studios, with Fox and Peter Chernin’s new production company the likely venue.
The 1980 game was a product of Cold War anxieties. Players were asked to defend six cities from an onslaught of ballistic missiles (represented by the sort-of squiggly lines) with the help of anti-missile weapons  (represented by flashing cursors) fired from alongside said cities.
Back in the summer, an auction erupted over another Atari property, Asteroids, which Universal and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura ended up winning. [LA Times]

There was a bidding war!  Over a the rights to something where the protagonist is a squiggly line!  The only way this story could sound dumber is if Channing Tatum read it aloud.

(This picture came up in a Google Image Search for “reincarnation.”  I dunno, man.)

Movie people were surprised by the success of Twilight when it first hit, but rest assured they won’t be the next time. These days they option promising young-adult series before they’re even published.  Like I Am Number Four before it, the movie rights to Traveling Pants author Ann Brashares’ upcoming series My Name is Memory have been acquired almost a year before the first book will be published.  See, because kids are stupid.  As Roman Polanski knows, you can just shove anything down their throats.

Peter Chernin won a bidding battle for screen rights to the first of a three-book series. Deal was for high-six against seven figures. ['against' meaning if the movie actually gets made]
Sold on the basis of a first installment that will be published next June by the Penguin imprint Riverhead Books, the series begins as a college-age couple meets, and a young man makes a startling confession. Turns out their souls have been reincarnated over hundreds of years, but these soulmates keep losing each other. While he remembers the details of their previous lives— and his often exasperating attempts to connect with her romantically—she cannot recall the events of those past lives. [Variety]

They both keep getting reincarnated as humans who live in the same neighborhood, well isn’t that convenient.  Their romance would be a lot more complicated if she came back as, say, a goat and he was a slime mold.  In fact, I wonder if that’s what happened in the case of the chimp and the toad:

Read the rest of this entry »