Just a day or so after James Cameron berated Hollywood (in the magazine Spiegel) for making a movie out of a property with so little plot as the board game Battleship, saying “This is pure desperation… This degrades the cinema,” comes news that Fox has snapped up the rights to the 1980s Atari arcade game Missile Command.
While the original game did have some sort of backstory – the original developers said it was set in California as part of a Cold War scenario, while later console editions went with a war between two planets – it was largely about defending some little blue things (cities), from assault by a variety of geomertric patterns, until you gave up or your blue things were destroyed.
Despite the lack of story to hang anything on, Variety reports Fox has signed a deal with Atari and set Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama (Dracula Year Zero, Flash Gordon) to write the screenplay. Rather like Battleship, beyond some basics, the movie could be about absolutely anything, so Fox has pretty much just bought the name, hoping a vaguely remembered brand will be enough to give it some traction at the box office.
Even Cameron admits, “Everyone in Hollywood knows how important it is that a film is a brand before it hit theaters. If a brand has been around, Harry Potter for example, or Spider-Man, you are light years ahead.” Before adding, “And there lies the problem. Because unfortunately these franchises are becoming more ridiculous.” He’s certainly unlikely to be happy about this laters development then.