Retro Asteroids game to move to big Screen

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Retro Asteroids game to move to big Screen

Thursday, 02 July 2009 16:42 administrator

'Asteroids' lands at Universal
July 02, 2009

By BORYS KIT
The Hollywood Reporter

Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation. Lorenzo di Bonaventura will produce. In "Asteroids," initially released as an arcade game in 1979, a player controlled a triangular space ship in an asteroid field. The object was to shoot and destroy the hulking masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both. As opposed to today's games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch. Universal, however, is used to that development process, as it's in the middle of doing just that for several of the Hasbro board game properties it is translating to the big screen, such as "Battleship" and "Candyland." Di Bonaventura's next outing is "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," which Paramount is set to open Aug. 7. Lopez came out of Disney's writing program and worked on that studio's recent movies "Bedtime Stories" and "Race to Witch Mountain." He also wrote the most recent draft of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," currently in production with Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel starring.

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0 #1 Jenny 2009-07-04 21:07 Really Asteriods…how do you make a movie on that?

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