Will board game movies float?
Looks like the next big thing in Hollywood could be full-length movie adaptations of our favorite old-school games and toys.
Battleship, a movie based on the board game you played as a kid, cruises into theaters today.
The PG-13 rated action film suggests its studio, Universal, might now be trying to hook moviegoers with the recognizable ring of a popular board game title. The link between the Battleship game and its movie adaptation is tenuous, though.
As a game, Battleship is hardly complex: arrange some plastic ships on your gridded playing board, guess how your opponent arranged his, and it’s pretty smooth sailing.
That’s admittedly not a lot to build off of plot-wise for an hour-and-twenty-minute film, so the silver screen adaptation of Battleship includes a few features your childhood games may have lacked, notably gun violence, alien invasions, and Rihanna.
This isn’t the first time Hollywood has turned our childhood diversions into movie ideas.
Universal Studios has already created film adaptations of two other Hasbro toys, Transformers and G.I. Joe. Back in 1985, one of the very first board games to get movie treatment was Clue, which tanked at box offices, grossing under $14,643,997 in America. Universal bought the rights to a remake anyway.
On top of that, there are more game-to-movie transformations in the pipeline — Universal has already purchased the rights to produce movie versions of Ouija, Risk, and Candy Land the future.
With the game and toy-based movie craze on the rise, our definition of what qualifies as an adaptation seems to be getting looser and looser.
When novels are adapted for the big screen, someone usually complains the movie hasn’t fully captured the text. To adapt Marvel comics, filmmakers have to cut out the majority of a superhero’s exploits to squeeze a whole series into a couple of hours.
But with little more in common than a name and logo, what constitutes a “faithful” film adaptation of a board game?
Or is that irrelevant — is Battleship: the movie more like an hour and a half long advertisement for Battleship: the game? Is it nothing more than a strategy to bring a generation of Angry Birds addicts back around to their basic board game roots?
If so, any aspiring screenwriters out there might want to start brainstorming film adaptations of popular games Hollywood hasn’t snagged yet — Scrabble and Hi-Ho Cherry-O are still up for grabs.
Annie Massa is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here. Follow her on Twitter at @annietweetsetc
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.