New Line Cinema is developing a movie based on Midway's retro arcade title Rampage. John Rickard, co-producer of Final Destination 5 and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, is meeting with writers to develop a story around the game's conceit of “ordinary people become monsters and smash everything.” The movie's intended as a tentpole blockbuster release, which is Hollywood-talk for “this thing needs to make a lot of money, and we're going to make sure it does by putting Bradley Cooper in it.”
Rampage, which debuted in the distant past of 1986, concerns itself with the affairs of three individuals – George, Lizzy, and Ralph – who are subjected to bizarre medical experiments and become giant monsters (of course). This takes up literally about three seconds of intro screen, after which it's time to climb buildings, smash tanks, eat people, and wage war on the military-industrial complex until you run out of quarters. Attempts to restart the franchise on N64 didn't go far; the last time we checked in with the series, it was to give the PS2 version a 6/10.
Those prone to worst-case-scenario thinking will doubtless be wringing their hands and saying, “a movie about ordinary people who become giant monsters? Sounds great, surely someone will ruin it!” However, Uwe Boll, cinema's preeminent ruiner of dodgy game storylines, already made a movie called Rampage a few years ago, which wasn't anything to do with the game and did very badly. Surely the game's bad karma has thus been erased and we can all look forward to a movie which will pay undue attention to making sure it gets this shot just right:
Above: Um, that's a tiny little naked lady down the bottom there. Yeah, this was somewhat notorious back in the day
