Say what you want about Atari – and I have done so on a couple of occasions – but they are nothing if not insistent. The publisher, far removed from its origins and now owned by Vivendi, has been attempting to shill its gaming properties for years, with uninspired remake after uninspired remake flooding the gaming space.
Well, now you can add feature films to their to-do list. Atari is partnering with Emmet/Furla/Oasis films in an attempt to make movies based on Missile Command and Centipede. This is not the first time Atari has attempted to make a movie based on a game: in 2010, they unsuccessfully shopped Missile Command to Hollywood. Like I said, they are insistent.
In examining this, I don’t know who is worse: Atari or Hollywood. Never mind that a movie came out recently that only had a small scene involving Centipede. That movie was the 2015 Adam Sandler abomination, Pixels. For those that don’t remember, that movie was not too well received. Now imagine an entire movie based on the idea of killing digitized insects. And lest we forget, Hollywood also gave us a big-screen adaptation of the board game Battleship and thought that was a good idea as well.
I really doubt Centipede and Missile Command movies will ever see the light of day, but Atari is persistent enough to keep trying.
