Good News: Hollywood Blockbusters Sink to New Record Low

Shit, we're already overbudget. Damn you ILM!!!

For those of you out there that might be thinking, “Is he talking about Aronofsky’s recently announced biopic of Noah and the ark?” No, but you get bonus points if that’s what you honestly thought this was about. Amazingly, this is about something much more hilarious. The good folks over at Hitfix and specifically the great Drew McWeeny have broken the story that the Atari game Asteroids is being developed into a film. Now, you are probably asking yourself, “Who would be the perfect person to helm what will surely be Hollywood’s great new property?” None other than Roland Emmerich, the king of shitty Hollywood blockbusters, is their front-runner for the gig. Oh, sweet Hollywood, just when I think you are getting your shit together you go and do something so amazing that you make me cry tears of joy. Not only do you never learn your lesson with people like Emmerich, the Wachowskis, and the emperor himself, Michael Bay, but you continue to run out of original ideas and as such are forced to plum the depths of properties that nobody in their right mind would have ever thought would be put on film.

For those that are unfamiliar, Asteroids is about as uninteresting a game as they come. It is an action packed tale of a triangular spacecraft that fires white dots at various sized (yup, you guessed it) asteroids attempting to keep them from hitting the ship. The ship can and does move around the screen and can turn in 360 degrees. Are you hard/wet yet? Yeah, me neither. Asteroids has no story except for the ship avoiding the titular “villains”, it comes in two colors (black and white) and is something that most people could probably program on a TI-85 calculator. By the way, do they still make those or are they past the 100’s at this point? Naturally, this lends itself well to being made into a film. If I had to go out on a really long and thin limb, I would venture to guess that Emmerich is looking at about a $100 million budget and the story will center around a number of asteroids heading towards Earth and the brave new spaceship and crew that are launched to stop it. Yeah, like Armageddon or Deep Impact (the film, not the porno) only with a hundred times more asteroids!!!!!!!! Are you hard/wet now? Nah, me neither.

Admittedly, this is definitely something that I do not have a hard time seeing Hollywood doing, despite the fact that it would have made an EXCELLENT Onion article as well. They must be pretty pissed right now and who can blame them? I’m pissed because they didn’t go with making a live-action version of Frogger instead. I mean, who wouldn’t have gone to see that? It’s still hard to believe that this is actually happening, but a fella can hope.