Alright, that’s it, everyone. Creativity is finally dead and gone. You probably already knew this full well from some of our previous film coverage. Remember the article we did two years ago about Sony and Mattel doing a View-Master movie? That’s how truly bad things are getting. Instead of a new intellectual property, let’s just take a name brand and make a movie out of that. Even if the brand has no story elements involved in it and it’s just a pair of viewing glasses. Thanks to Atari, that death of creative energy is about to get worse.
Someone Must Really Love Atari Games
Producers and writers Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe have developed some sort of a spec script based on an Atari property that has Universal intrigued. It motivated them to make a deal with Atari to potentially adapt 10 of their franchises into future films. Those 10 franchises are Adventure, Asteroids, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars’ Revenge. There is so much wrong with this that it’s hard to even know where to start.
Maybe the most blatant bit of ridiculousness in this is Pong. PONG?! It’s boring tennis! It’s two white lines and a square dot. Digital air hockey with LESS movement! Tennis and table tennis are free to license, by the way. You don’t need to purchase the rights to the sport of tennis to make a tennis movie. But for whatever reason, Universal and Atari entered into a business agreement over the film rights to Pong. Why? Probably because it makes news headlines. “Universal to Make Movie About Tennis” doesn’t ring as absurdly as “Universal to Make Movie Based on Pong Video Game.” The latter gets attention, the former doesn’t.
Licensing Sequels Too? Really?
Then there’s Breakout in that list. That’s basically just one-player Pong. Why did you list both of them? Breakout is just knocking the ball against immobile bricks to eliminate them. Like literally, it was made so a single person could enjoy what Pong is like. A similar statement can be made about Centipede and Millipede. Millipede is just a sequel with more bugs. Why the hell are you licensing both of them? It makes absolutely no sense unless it was required in, like, an Atari package deal. Like when you used to subscribe to cable and had to get ESPN Classics if you wanted regular ESPN.
Asteroids? Yeah, we already had that movie twice. They were called Armageddon and Deep Impact. You don’t need to license the rights to Asteroids to make a movie about blowing up space rocks. Seriously, what the f**k is going on here? Do the execs at Atari and Universal think the moviegoing audience is so stupid that they have to brand a movie with the video game name of Asteroids to see a film about them? Same thing with Missile Command! WE ALREADY HAVE MOVIES ABOUT MISSILE THREATS! WE HAVE THEM AT HOME! ON VHS! ON DVD! WE’VE HAD THEM FOR DECADES!
Who Cares About Brand Recognition?
Now, you could argue that at least Berzerk and Yar’s Revenge have more story elements to them that could be turned into a film. But nobody gives a flying f**k about Berzerk or Yar’s Revenge to go see a movie based on them. These are not popular franchises. For Christ’s sake, Mortal Kombat II failed at the box office and the brand awareness of that franchise is MASSIVELY greater than Yar’s-goddamn-Revenge. There has to be an adult in the room who realizes what a dumbass idea this all is, right?
Because this weirdly idiotic idea is just germinating, we don’t have more details about what’s going to become of these. Somehow, we’re going to just assume that these will all feature Dwayne Johnson in them. They all feel exactly like the kind of movie he’d be in. We’ll keep you posted in the glorious event that someone realizes how dumb this is and puts a stop to it.
