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Following the success of movies like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. at the box office, it seems like pretty much everyone in Hollywood at the moment is looking at video games as a potential source for film ideas.
It wasn't too long ago, for instance, we were writing about Broken Sword striking up a deal with Story Kitchen to bring the classic point-and-click adventure to cinema screens, and, of course, that's without mentioning the endless wave of Sega film deals we've covered in the past, and Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film (which recently got a new trailer). It all feels like a bit of a gold rush at the moment, with some of these announcements clearly making a lot more sense than others in terms of their potential to be adapted into a feature-length movie.
This brings us to the story at hand. A new report from Deadline has just been published suggesting some of Atari's iconic games could one day make their way to the big screen. As outlined by Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr., Atari, together with Entertainment 360, has put pen to paper on a deal with Universal Pictures, which would see 10 of its classic games get the movie treatment, with the titles listed including: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars’ Revenge.
The catalyst for this deal was apparently an original spec script by Matt Reilly, a studio exec at Universal, and Carl Hampe, a producer on Hellboy (2019) and Jungle Cruise, based on an undisclosed Atari IP (presumably from the list above), with Entertainment 360’s Guymon Casady set to produce.
“Matt Reilly and I grew up playing Atari 2600 games and have remained fans ever since,” Casady told Deadline. “The best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest. Carl and Matt saw an opportunity to take that same spirit and build an original, large-scale adventure around it. From the moment we read the screenplay, we believed there was a great movie here.”
Atari Chairman and CEO Wade Rosen, meanwhile, added, “For more than five decades, Atari has created games and worlds that have remained part of popular culture long after their original release. We are excited to work with Universal and Entertainment 360 to bring the spirit of our iconic brand and games to a new medium.”
Considering how light on story some of these games are, our immediate reaction to the news was confusion, and looking at the reaction on social media, it seems like we weren't alone, with some doubting these films will ever actually get made and questioning what you'd actually do with them if they are.
One BlueSky user, for example, brought up an old joke from the crime/mystery show Castle, in which Nathan Fillion's character used Hollywood optioning a film about Asteroids as a sign it was out of ideas, suggesting the throwaway gag could become a reality. And, elsewhere, they were joined by the screenwriter C. Robert Cargill (Doctor Strange, Sinister 1 & 2, and Black Phone), who wrote the following on BlueSky about the decision:
"This is a real headscratcher. I'm literally the target demo for this; I write movies for a living, and I have no idea what you would do with these. They weren't stories. The ideas behind them were incredibly thin. It's IP for the sake of IP & we keep seeing that fail."
What are your thoughts on the announcement? Let us know in the comments!