[Vulture]

“Two Julys ago, Universal Pictures won a four-way bidding war for the rights to turn Atari’s 1979 hit arcade game Asteroids into a feature film. How do you take a game about a capital letter A floating about aimlessly in deep space shooting decimal points (or are they periods?) at large, frozen rocks and flying saucers and turn it into a movie? Well, Universal’s trying to hire director of destruction Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012).

Vulture hears that Asteroids has just been offered to Emmerich by Universal, which is developing the feature film with Transformers: Dark of the Moon producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. The script comes from Matt Lopez, best known for writing Disney’s The Race to Witch Mountain (a movie which, for those concerned with verisimilitude, does contain flying saucers).”

As bad as this film sounds (since it is based on the classic Atari video game) this news doesn’t surprise me in the least. I mean with films like Real Steal (which is basically Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots), Battleship (based on the Hasbro board game) and projects like Candyland and Monopoly on the way, nothing surprises me anymore. Since there really wasn’t any story to be found in the classic game, writers for this project can go in any direction, so it seems only fitting that a game about destroying asteroids should involve the “Master of Disaster” himself, Roland Emmerich, as director. 

Sure, he’s said he’ll never do an Earth destruction film ever again, but enough money and a very loose loophole planned for this film may be enough to get him on board.