Enough already. Do we really need another game — board or video — ported to the big screen? Well, if you’re the producer of the ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ movies, anything goes: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who marshalled those toys into movies, has optioned the rights to the classic 1980s ‘Space Invaders’ arcade game. That’s right, the quintessential shooter game that propelled video games from geekdom to middle-class obsession.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, di Bonaventura and Odd Lot Entertainment’s Gigi Pritzker are on the hunt for a writer to come up with a coherent story line that will capitalize on the game’s simple premise: a player fending off attacking aliens’ laser blasts. Anything is possible in Hollywood. Remember the ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie? By the way, di Bonaventura is already working on developing another game: ‘Asteroids.’
From the ridiculous to the sublime: David Schwimmer, fresh off directing ‘Trust,’ a chilling film that tackles the dark side of the Internet (and which hits DVD July 26), told Empire Magazine that he has optioned the rights to an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s epic muckraking novel ‘The Jungle.’ As you’ll recall from American Lit 101, ‘The Jungle’ (1906) was an expose of the horrible working conditions that immigrants had to suffer through in the late-19th and early 20th centuries; it has become more famous, however, for exposing corruption in the food industry. Schwimmer told Empire the film would be a “character-driven” story about “a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.” (Sinclair’s 1927 ‘Oil!’, by the way, was the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’). Good for you, David. [via CinemaBlend]
Warning: Working on TV’s ‘Modern Family’ can be good for your acting health. Just ask young Nolan Gould, whose exposure on the series has boosted his big screen career (as it has for co-stars Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen and Eric Stonestreet). Gould — who can be seen in ‘Friends With Benefits,’ which opens July 22, has joined the cast of ‘The To Do List,’ where he will play the leader of the Pool Rats, a gang that spends the summer hanging out at their local pool, creating mischief and figuring out what the older kids are doing, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film, starring Andy Samberg, Bill Hader, Rachel Bilson and Aubrey Plaza, is written and will be directed by Maggie Carey, and centers on a recent high-school grad who feels pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college. The comedy is slated for a 2013 release.