Browsing through Apple Trailers recently, I spotted this poster for one of the summer’s big movie blockbusters:
That’s right. It seems everyone’s favourite vertical/horizontal board game Battleships has its own movie license. Ooh – look at the shiny effects: the big alien ship-thingy with blue laser nipples rising from the sea whilst our hero Taylor (he’s-so-hot-right-now) Kitsch looks on in an action-man stance.
But move your eyes up to the top of the page. See the quote?
‘FROM HASBRO THE COMPANY THAT BROUGHT YOU TRANSFORMERS’.
Unless they’re simply talking about the toy which I highly doubt, isn’t that a revelation? Silly old me thought that Paramount Studios and their hundreds of millions of dollars and the unquestionably demented vision of Michael Bay was responsible for the Transformers movie, but apparently not. Take this direct quote from Battleship director Peter Berg being interviewed by Empire Magazine;
“They (Hasbro) offered us very little in terms of direction about what kind of story we wanted to tell, other than it should involve ‘naval warfare’.”
Wow. Apparently you can now claim full credit for a movie with as minimal input as possible as long as you stick bits and pieces of plastic together and trademark the name. Someone should tell J.K Rowling’s parents that they’re being screwed out of royalties. They stuck their bits and pieces together and made her, after all. I can see it now: every Harry Potter DVD sporting the quote; ‘From Mr and Mrs Rowling, the people who brought you J.K Rowling, who then brought you Harry Potter.’ I am a marketing genius.
It seems toy brands and board games are the next thing for Hollywood right now, with another G.I. Joe on the way and a Monopoly as well as Ouija movie being considered. Yes, it’s become that bad.
So I’d be a fool not to jump on the bandwagon and pitch my own ideas to those studio fat cats. Here’s a few:
Snakes and Ladders
Set during WWII, Snakes and Ladders is a dark, powerful and emotional drama starring Meryl Streep as a woman forced by the Nazis to choose between her snake or her ladder.
KerPlunk!
Nicolas Cage is an undercover police officer who must escape a futuristic prison before the roof collapses and everything goes, well, KerPlunk. Meryl Streep will play the prison warden, Miss Marble.
Buckaroo
Directed by Steven Spielberg, this moving war-time drama tells the story of Buck, a horse with a crippling form of epilepsy. His owner, played by Toby Maguire, is positive he can train the horse for the battlefield. But can he do it in time before the horse goes Buck-Buck-Buckaroo? Meryl Streep plays stable hand #3.
Operation
Taut action-thriller in which Keanu Reeves plays a top surgeon who must diffuse a terrorist-implanted bomb from the president’s nose by carefully removing the detonation triggers from the President’s various body parts. Meryl Streep isn’t in this one.
Other ideas in the comments ladies and gentlemen.
