Space Invaders Is The Latest Part Of Your Childhood To Get Its Own Movie
This article is more than 2 years old
If you’re of a certain age, the pixelated Taito video game Space Invaders probably holds a special fondness for you. Many of us whiled away hours, not to mention countless quarters we scrounged from various sources, zipping back and forth, firing missiles that look suspiciously like capital Is at perhaps the least threatening threat from outer space that we’ve ever seen. After all, who is afraid of blocky little aliens, at least until the last few and they started moving super fast. Then they got scary as hell. And if you’ve always wanted to see this drama played out on a massive scale, you’re in luck, as Warner Bros. has acquired the movie rights and plans a film adaptation.
To make this movie a reality, the studio has brought in a collection of high profile producers, headed by Akiva Goldsman, writer and producer of such films as I Am Legend, Insurgent, and many, many more. Joining him in this task are Joby Harold, who produced Edge of Tomorrow and Tory Tunnell, who produced Awake and Holy Rollers.
If you’re asking yourself how exactly they plan on adapting this into a movie, you are most definitely not the only one. And if you think this is a questionable idea, there are a great many others on your team as well. Space Invaders is a great game, a classic beloved by millions, but there is absolutely no narrative aside from there are aliens, they are from space, and they are invading. Granted, movies have been built on far less, and we get it, there is worldwide name recognition in play, but how the hell do they intend to pull this one off?
This news may induce flashbacks to 2012 and Peter Berg’s adaptation of Milton Bradley’s board game Battleship, which, by damn near every last account, was an unmitigated disaster (and I liked it far more than most people). That was another case of a movie being forced out of a property with a familiar name, but little to no actual story. Are Warner Bros. and Goldsman going to try to shoehorn and obligatory reference to the boxy game play into the movie? That didn’t work out so well for Battleship.
Then again, there is probably something very freeing to know that you’re working with an almost completely blank slate. As long as you include invaders from space, and someone trying to stop them, you do whatever the hell you damn well please and it will fit into the parameters. And who knows, maybe in a couple years we’ll be talking about Space Invaders as one of our favorite science fiction movies of all time. This early in the process, we’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. It seems the most unlikely of circumstances, but stranger things have happened, and who even knows if it will every actually materialize or if it will fall apart somewhere along the line.
There’s currently no time table for Space Invaders, but you know that as soon as we find out anything, we’ll be sure to pass it along to you.
