Many moons ago Hollywood adapted plays and novels to make films, then comic strips and radio plays were successfully mined for box office gold. Later television series were turned into epic, popcorn-selling tent-pole movies. It seemed almost anything could be morphed into a feature film: A theme park ride–Pirates of The Carribean; a computer game–Resident Evil; even a Saturday morning cartoon that’s pretty much a half-hour commercial for a nifty toy–Transformers.
Toymakers Hasbro who have had so much success with the Transformers franchise, have been developing their board games as movie properties for some years now. In February 2008, Hasbro and Universal Pictures signed a deal to turn a number of iconic toys and games into movies – Monopoly, Candy Land and Clue were three of the game titles announced. (Older readers will recall CLUE was made into a movie back in 1985)
A movie based on the game BATTLESHIP is the first feature to emerge from the Hasbro/Universal partnership. It stars Liam Neeson (TAKEN), Taylor Kitsch (SNAKES ON A PLANE), Brooklyn Decker (JUST GO WITH IT) and Alexander Skarsgård (GENERATION KILL).
The story concerns a fleet of ships being forced to do battle with an armada of unknown origins in order to discover and thwart their destructive goals. It gives nothing away to say this “unknown armada” appears to originate from somewhere deep in space.AccessReel will not be the first movie site to wonder whether the world is ready for a maritime version of BATTLE FOR LOS ANGELES (2010).
And although I haven’t checked in my parents’ garage for the old Milton and Bradley version of Battleship that I co-own with my brother, I believe all the ships in the old game were of the regular, non-space-travelling kind. Nor do I remember pop diva Rihanna being part of proceedings. Oh yeah, she’s in the movie playing a naval weapons officer.
The first trailer is out now. See what you think. We won’t be seeing the finished film in Australia until mid 2012.
