Corona | Coming Attractions

Universal has hired screenwriter Jez Butterworth to write a new draft for their gestating video game picture Asteroids. Butterworth wrote the script for Fair Game, the Doug Liman-directed movie about the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative during President Bush's tenure in the White House, as well as The Last Legion.

There might be new interest within Universal to get a move on and push the Asteroids movie concept into a more definitive shape. Disney is reaping rich box office results from their CG cartoon Wreck-It Ralph which relies on retro arcade game characters and nolstagia.

Collider got the opportunity to interview Roland Emmerich and asked him if the rumors were true and he was lined up to direct the Asteroids movie. His answer?

"Nope. I was very honored that they wanted to have me as a director, and I kind of liked the script very much, but at that time I was writing with my writing partner Harold Kloser a new script called Singularity and I opted for that."

Question: if your movie is set after the destruction of Earth, who's the best directing candidate in Hollywood to get?

The best answer to that question is likely Roland Emmerich, the director of such end of the world films as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. And according to today's rumor, an offer went out to Emmerich from Universal to helm their Asteroids movie.

How do we know that the Asteroids movie is set after the Earth gets toasted? Well, according to the source's scooper, Matt Lopez's script takes place after an alien force has blown the Earth to smithereens. The human survivors now reside in our asteroid belt and have the aliens as neighbors...

...holy crap. Did Lopez actually pull this off and come up with a movie concept that faithfully captures what Asteroids the video game was about?

IGN uncovered our first story details about the Asteroids movie from an exclusive interview with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. It looks like there will actually be more seen in the movie that a spaceship blowing up giant hunks of rock!

"It's funny because people say there's nothing in the game, but that's not entirely right," di Bonaventura explained to the site. "I was attracted to Asteroids, plain and simple, because I think what it tells you is that there's going to be this big thing in space."

The producer went on to elaborate. "We've crafted a really strong, deep mythology for the thing. Without divulging too much about it, it's two lead characters - two brothers - who have to go through a seminal experience to figure out their relationship, against this huge backdrop."

And when asked if there will be any scenes showing the game's action, di Bonaventura replied, "Well you'd better have some guys in spaceships blowing stuff up or else you haven't honoured the fun of Asteroids."

Universal Pictures beat three other movie studios and successfully purchased the movie rights to the 1979 coin-op arcade game Asteroids. Screenwriter Matt Lopez (Race to Witch Mountain) will write a screenplay based on the game's threadbare concept about a spaceship that blasts a never-ending stream of deadly space rocks. Lorenzo di Bonaventura (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) will produce. [Full story]