We were only saying yesterday that Hollywood was getting more and more desperate with the things it’s prepared to adapt into a movie. Coming hot on the heels of the annoucement that Universal has won a bidding war to adapt the 70s videogame Asteroids for the big screen, comes news that Dreamworks is apparently planning a movie based on Viewmaster. Yes, that’s right, they want to make a movie based on that red thing you put circular slides in and get to see 3D pictures.
Screenwriter Caleb Kane has said that after he’s done writing Columbia Pictures’ sci-fi action-adventure Uprising for director Wolfgang Petersen, he’ll start working on the Viewmaster movie, which will be “like the old 80’s Amblin movies: Goonies, Young Sherlock… In that vein.”
With all the advanced entertainment kids have nowadays, it’s tough to imagine anything will get them excited about the Viewmaster. And what the hell sort of movie can you make out of it, anyway? The most likely scenario is that some kids find a special Viewmaster with magical powers, however we’re hoping for a serious arthouse film, which is just two hours of 3D pictures of Mickey Mouse and random 80s TV shows, interspersed with that weird clicking noise the Viewmaster makes when you change the slide, plus the rumblings of a child very quickly getting bored and going off to do something more interesting.