Sunday, August 09, 2009

Board Games and Toys mean Money for Hollywood

With Hasbro, we've now seen the release of Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and most recently, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

With the board games and other card games, we've seen Clue: The Movie. Upcoming projects include Battleship (2011), Monopoly (in development), Candy Land, and Ouija to name a few.

But this one, I don't get, the View-Master.
It was recently announced that Transformers and Star Trek writers Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci will be producing a film for DreamWorks based on the View-Master, the decades-old Fisher-Price/Mattel toy.[...]

"It's funny," Kurtzman says. "When we signed on to do Transformers, there was this incredibly cynical reaction to the idea that, 'Oh, it's just a toy line.' And I would hope that by now, people would know we would never walk into something if we didn't actually have a real story behind it. Without giving away any details about the story, certain toys should never be movies -- and certain toys should be. And I think we spent a lot of time talking about the difference between those."

"And it wasn't born in sin," Orci adds. "What happened was we had a friend who wrote on Fringe, Brad Caleb Kane, who had a pitch that he wanted to do this movie. He wasn't even thinking of View-Master. And then our company got a look at it and thought, 'We could actually connect this with View-Master,' who we know happens to be looking [for a movie idea]. So it wasn't like, 'Let's come up with a View-Master movie!' There was a great idea … there and it was perfect to marry with View-Master."

As for the fact that unlike G.I. Joe or the Transformers, the View-Master is not a character… well, the producers aren't too stressed about that.

"It depends on how you define character," Kurtzman says. "Because some characters are obviously human. Other characters are… The Enterprise is a character in Star Trek. But the Enterprise never speaks."

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