In 2007, director Seth Gordon brought us the documentary The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters, the story of one man’s struggle to become the world champion of the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. Gordon’s next project looks to also be connected to 1980s and the playing of games on computers. He’ll be overseeing the development of a remake of the 1983 thriller War Games for MGM with an towards directing the feature.
In the original, Matthew Broderick played a naive computer hacker who breaks into a Department of Defense computer and inadvertently triggers a countdown to the launch of America’s thermonuclear missile arsenal at the Soviet Union. The original came out at the perfect time to capitalize on the prevailing mood of Reagan-era America, even if it’s final conclusion that “the only winning move is not to play” may be a little too pacifistic for some hardline Righties.
While some of War Games may seem a bit quaint today, it has a central story conceit that is still a solid one.And one can see echoes of the idea of computer run war in such films as the Terminator franchise, Live Free Or Die Hard and even Superman III. And given the recent news stories about such groups as Anonymous and LulzSec, it is an idea that certainly is as timely as ever.
This would be the latest remake of something out of their old catalog of films that MGM has launched in the past couple of months since emerging from their bankruptcy proceedings. The studio also has Jose Padilha getting ready to direct a Robocop redo and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa working on a new version of Stephen King’s horror novel Carrie.
Via Deadline.
