Hollywood Archive

  • Atari’s Missile Command (from 1980) to become live-action movie

    Atari’s Missile Command (from 1980) to become live-action movie

    In case you needed another indicator Hollywood has run out of ideas, here is a new one for you: Atari is about to sell the movie rights to Missile Command, a shooting game that hit arcades back in 1980, to 20th Century Fox and another movie production company. Getting the license doesn't necessarily mean we ever get to see a Missile Command movie on the big screen, but a first step has been made. And in fact, Atari already managed to auction off the rights for Asteroids, another classic action game, to Universal Pictures last summer. Missile Command is supposed to be turned into a 3D movie.

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  • Warner Bros. looking to reboot Superman movie franchise. Again.

    Warner Bros. looking to reboot Superman movie franchise. Again.

    Get ready for another movie franchise re-boot! Yes, Warner Bros. wants to re-boot Superman, and it wants Christopher Nolan to sorta oversee the project, but not direct it. You'll recall that Mr. Nolan successfully re-booted Batman, the silliness of the second film notwithstanding. Money is money.

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  • The latest movie franchise to be rebooted? Mortal Kombat. Yikes.

    The latest movie franchise to be rebooted? Mortal Kombat. Yikes.

    Does the world need another Mortal Kombat movie? No, probably not, but that won't stop Hollywood from attempting to exploit a license that was last hot in 1994. Word on the street is that Warner Bros. wants to, yes, “reboot” the series. (Note: You cannot reboot a dead computer, so I don't know if it's possible to reboot a dead movie franchise.) To that end it has hired Oren Uziel to write the script. You've probably never heard of Uziel, but he wrote Shimmer Lake. You've probably never heard of that, either.

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  • Video: HP has itself a Wall of Touch

    Video: HP has itself a Wall of Touch

    What to make of HP's "Wall of Touch"? The Wall Street Journal has a nifty little write-up of the technology, and comes away like it just shook hands with Brock Lesnar's doctors. "Thank you so much, doctor!" The fact is, despite the fact that you don't actually touch the Wall of Touch, the idea of touchscreen interfaces is no longer foreign and exotic. We're several years after Jeff Han's big demonstration, plus there was that iPhone thing.

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  • Spider-Man 4 gets a director: Marc Webb, from (500) Days of Summer

    Spider-Man 4 gets a director: Marc Webb, from (500) Days of Summer

    It's time for your Hollywood Minute! Late last night it emerged that Marc Webb, the director of (500) Days of Summer, which I think is a romantic comedy/drama judging by the trailer (I do have the rip sitting on one of my hard drives, lest you think we don't practice what we preach), will direct Spider-Man 4. The movie is currently scheduled to be released in the summer of 2012, and may well be filmed in 3D.

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  • EA confirms Wii version of NBA JAM

    EA confirms Wii version of NBA JAM

    nbajamLet’s not mention the disturbing trend that’s been cropping up lately – namely that gaming studios are taking a tip from Hollywood and seem to be rehashing a lot of old titles instead of coming up with new ones – and instead rejoice about the recent rumor-turned-official announcement: NBA JAM is coming for the Wii.

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  • Mother Russia plans to save us all from killer asteroid

    Mother Russia plans to save us all from killer asteroid

    Someone call Bruce Willis. Russia announced Wednesday that they are considering launching a spacecraft with the intention of altering its possibly earth-crushing trajectory to a less threatening one.

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  • Banhammer hits loads of Chinese piracy sites

    Banhammer hits loads of Chinese piracy sites

    Hey, something's happening in China vis-à-vis piracy! The country's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has been fiddling with downloads there for the past few days, and people are complaining that they're not about to access the content they were once able to.

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  • First reviews of Avatar appear, but stay away

    First reviews of Avatar appear, but stay away

    So Avatar premiered tonight in London and apparently nearly everyone loved it. Twitter is aflutter with first impressions and even Drudge's main headline proclaims the film is "Oscar Bound." But here's the thing. Don't read the early reviews. Just know that so far it's living up to its $237 million expectation. The last thing you need to do is go read one of the reviews raving about the movie and spoil all your fun.

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  • Targeted by Hollywood, OpenBitTorrent lives to fight another day

    Targeted by Hollywood, OpenBitTorrent lives to fight another day

    Not a day goes by without coming across one or more stories related to The Pirate Bay. Today is no different, with OpenBitTorrent (a tracker that Hollywood has accused of being The Pirate Bay's spiritual successor, serving some 550,000 “works”) being given a new lease on life by a Swedish court. The gist is, Hollywood wanted the tracker shut down, but said Swedish court denied the action.

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  • They made a King of Fighters live-action movie and the trailer looks terrible

    They made a King of Fighters live-action movie and the trailer looks terrible

    Since the 1990s, 2D fighting game series King of Fighters has always been the (smaller), and some hardcore gamers say better, counterpart to Streetfighter. Streetfighter saw not one but two live-action movies based on the thin story lines of the games, and now someone in Hollywood decided it's time for a King of Fighters movie. And does it surprise anybody the promo trailer that was just released looks horrendous?

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  • Captain Kirk’s missing scene from JJ’s Star Trek

    Captain Kirk’s missing scene from JJ’s Star Trek

    William Shatner did have a part in the new Star Trek as it turns out. It wasn't a major role like Leonard Nimoy's, but rather a recording that Nimoy's Spock would give to the younger Spock at the end of the film. It obviously never made the film but I somewhat wish it had.

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  • Do video game publishers misrepresent their games in order to get lower ratings?

    Do video game publishers misrepresent their games in order to get lower ratings?

    There's some sort of video game developer conference going on in Motreal this week (titled, to use its full name, the Montreal International Game Summit), and an interesting charge was just levied there. The CEO of A2M (the company that developed Wet), Rémi Racine, said that some game publishers will go out of their way to deceive the ESRB in order to get a lower rating for their games. You know how Hollywood tries hard to make sure the summer blockbusters are rated no higher than PG-13 in order to ensure a large audience? Same thing with video games, apparently. Why release an M-rated game, and know that your limiting your potential audience, when you can eek out with a T rating?

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  • An asteroid almost smashed into Earth, and we only knew about it 15 hours before it happened

    An asteroid almost smashed into Earth, and we only knew about it 15 hours before it happened

    Did you hear the news? An asteroid passed within 8,700 miles of the planet on Friday. The craziest thing is that scientists only knew about it 15 hours before it flew by. So if you have any confidence that this planet is safe from giant space objects smashing into the surface, possibly destroying all life in the process, well, think again.

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  • Get ready for the LCROSS lunar impact this Friday

    Get ready for the LCROSS lunar impact this Friday

    Be sure to set your alarm clock for around 6am this Friday, for at 6:15am NASA will, in the immortal words of Matt Drudge, “bomb the moon.” No, we're not talking about some dumb Hollywood (redundancy alert!) scenario, but the most exciting part of the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) program: the lunar impact.

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