Asteroids, the movie

I get a lot of entertainment newsletters. See this entry from today.

Universal snags the big screen rights to Atari's classic Asteroids videogame, beating out several other studios, per THR. The Asteroids movie will be penned by Matthew Lopez (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Race to Witch Mountain) and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Making a movie based on the Asteroids game will be interesting because the game, released back in 1979, has no storyline associated with it at all. Other toy-based movies currently in development at Universal include Hasbro's Battleship and Candyland.

I don't really even have a response to the idea that Universal is making movies based on
- a video game with the least potential storyline ever and only vector graphics
- a board game where you yell out the name of a square on a grid
- a board game where girls run around a candy forest (pre-teen, so stop perving)

I mean, I understand the idea of tie-ins. Hasbro also has a big deal with EA for video games, so it's a big Hasbro-EA-Universal love fest. But seriously, Asteroids? I guess we can all start looking forward to Combat: The Movie.