'Ice Age 3' breaking up 'Transformers,' and 'Asteroids' in our future

By Sarah Sluis

First, a note on yesterday's box-office returns. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs debuted with $14 million, followed by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen's $10 million, then Public Enemies' $8 million. If these results hold, it looks like Transformers 2 will be unseated in its second week.

One of the producers on the Transformers franchise, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, has another game adaptation on his list: Asteroids. The 1979 Atari game (which you can play online here) has no plot and no backstory. It's just shooting asteroids before they shoot you. Since many video games with complicated backstories fail to thrive at the box office, perhaps creating a story out of such a bare-bones premise could actually work. After all, Hasbro has been licensing versions of its games like Monopoly, Battleship, and Stretch Armstrong. The property even ignited a bidding war, with four studios vying for rights to the work. Matt Lopez, who has recently penned high-profile projects like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Race to Witch Mountain, and Bedtime Stories, is in charge of the first draft.

Although the game Asteroids debuted in 1979, about five years before the Transformers television show, people played the game for years afterwards. Later-model consoles, arcades, and early computers (where I first played an Asteroids-type game) carried versions of Asteroids. People from teens to 40-somethings have probably had some direct exposure to the game, making this picture a potential "four-quadrant" film, the term marketers love. What direction will they take? The 1984 movie The Last Starfighter featured a boy good at an Asteroids-type game who is recruited by a stranger from another galaxy to save its world from invading aliens. That kind of plot is every kid's fantasy, though I'm not sure it's the direction the studio will go. In the Transformers franchise, the machines are always "real," it's just that their reality isn't universally acknowledged. You don't have to go to another world for it to become real. Universal has a great property on its hands--hopefully it will swim, not sink, in development.