Director Roland Emmerich has earned a reputation for destroying things, whether it was in Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, so maybe it’s no surprise that Universal Pictures is offering the German filmmaker the reins to turn the 1979 Atari video game Asteroids into a movie, at least that’s according to New York Magazine’s Vulture.
Universal have been developing the feature with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura from a script by Matt Lopez (Race to Witch Mountain) after purchasing the rights two years ago. Their story goes on to say that the movie is being seen as a sequel to films like Independence Day and 2012 after the earth has been destroyed and the aliens have won with the humans living on colonies within an asteroid belt along with aliens who they learn were responsible for Earth’s destruction. Since the movie won’t involve Earth being destroyed, they surmise that it won’t go against Emmerich’s recent declaration that he was done making movies in which he destroyed Earth.
There’s nothing confirmed that Emmerich will agree to do it, but he does seem like the most obvious director to make the movie due to content and presumed scale, and I’m sure we’ll hear more soon if he digs the script and feels like going back to epic movies filled with destruction following his upcoming Shakespeare drama Anonymous, which has just moved to October 28.
