The Space Invaders movie is still happening

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The long-gestating Space Invaders film may yet make it to the screen, albeit as slowly as the horizontally-descending aliens on which the project is based.

The Hollywood adaptation of Space Invaders, the classic alien-blasting arcade game, seems to have been in development for a long time now.

Warner Bros acquired the rights and put the project into active development as far back as 2014, with Akiva Goldsman producing. Whilst a script was reportedly commissioned, it all went very quiet for a few years until it was announced in 2019 that Greg Russo, the writer behind the upcoming Mortal Kombat adaptation, would be penning a new draft. Russo, who is also working on a script for the adaptation of the popular Saints Row video game series for F Gary Gray, has been chatting a little about what his version of Space Invaders might look like. 

Space Invaders is over at Warner Bros., and it’s at New Line, too, the same kind of crew that put together Mortal Kombat, and that’s one I’m really excited about. That’s a movie when I approached it I was like ‘I don’t want to do Independence Day … I don’t want to do the invasion movie I’ve seen 100 times.’ And so for me, it was about finding a new way into that title, which I think is going to really blow people away expectations-wise and they’re going to see something that hopefully they weren’t expecting, so I’m excited for it”.

Exactly what the film looks like if it isn’t an invasion movie is quite the question then, as the arcade game consisted solely of aliens invading the planet in horizontal-moving waves, with only the player’s lone ship to fend them off. As Futurama once put it, if the aliens’ craft had ever learned to land vertically, it would have been a much shorter game. Whatever Russo has up his sleeve, it certainly sounds original and we’re keen to see what that might look like. 

Hopefully, Russo’s crack at Space Invaders will make it into production and we’ll get to see for ourselves. We’ll bring you more news on this one as we hear it. 

Movieweb

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