Back in the days before the Soviet Union tainted America’s water supply with lead, turning us into a nation of brain-damaged drooling idiots who’ll willfully spend all our capitalist lucre on anything shiny with a flashing light or two, the process of making a Hollywood movie started first and foremost with finding an engrossing story which contained such elements as “plot” and “characters.” While this method of movie-making was creatively fruitful, it was often financially risky and, especially given the rapidly devolving Intellectual State of the Union, often amounted to a lot of effort wasted on the mouth-breathing, TXT messaging, lovely-lady-belumped masses.

Luckily, Hollywood figured out a better way to make movies. Call it “adapting,” repurposing” or “rebooting,” the process is efficient, simple, and genius in its stupidity:

1. Take an existing intellectual property, catchphrase or inanimate object that has some degree of recognition with the general public — or at least did 30 years ago.

2. Hire a “screenwriter” — preferably someone who went to USC (which is like DeVry Institute for rich kids), majoring in film because they felt (per their application) “TOP GUN WAZ DA BOM!!” and wanted to do stuff like that, only with more explosions and latently homoerotic male bonding scenes – to type 90 to 120 pages into Final Draft. Said pages should contain the phrases “WE SEE” “SPLOSION!” and “GLISENING BICEPS” (sic) in copious amounts, as well as no less than 5,000 exclamation points. Actual content? Unimportant, so long as no single paragraph of action or dialog exceeds 3 lines.

3. Hire Michael Bay, Brett Ratner, or some equally cheesy Miami-Vice-bad-guy-ish music video/commercial director/date rapist to film/CGI a bunch of unrelated action sequences/product placement scenes loosely based on the above-mentioned Final Draft document.

4. Market the living shit out of it and hope the people will fall for it like they do every other substance-free product shoved down their throats. Which they likely will, unless some other studio’s marketing campaign is more ubiquitous than yours, in which case the entire endeavor will be used as an excuse to withhold royalties due on other movies which WERE successful, even though the people owed said royalties had nothing to do with your turkey-bomb.

Lather, rinse, repeat. And while there seems to be no shortage of pop-culture-friendly intellectual properties, catchphrases and inanimate objects to serve as fodder for these Hollywood Movies 2.0, perhaps none serve the purpose better than VIDEO GAMES. I submit for your reference: Mario Brothers, DooM, Hitman, the Uwe Boll canon, and of course the massive blockbuster success that was Halo which, admittedly, exists only theoretically in our dimension, but was a fucking MONSTER in Dimension 12A and garnered an OsKaR for Bizarro Superman in his tear-jerking roll of “MaSTeR CheIF.” So it comes as no surprise that Warner Bros. and game publisher Capcom plan to adapt the minor console hit “Lost Planet” for the big screen. I mean – it’s the favorite game for literally HUNDREDS of morbidly obese Arkansas teens whose parents were to cheap to buy them “Gears of War.” So, you know, let’s make a movie out of that.

Avi Arad, Ari Arad and Steven Paul will produce through their Seaside Entertainment shingle. Script will be typed by David Hayter, the voice of Snake in the “Metal Gear Solid” games, who isn’t actually a Trojan, but (perhaps a far worse offense) is Canadian — just like Hitler, Communism, the HIV virus, and Alanis Morisette.

Tweet This Post 

• Uwe Boll’s POSTAL: Better than Crystal Skull?
• Peter Berg sinks your BATTLESHIP
• Spike Lee: Bla-bla-bla Hollywood bla-bla-bla Black People bla-bla-bla
• ‘Grand Theft Auto’ movie rumors untrue
• Nintendo Channel launched…