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Spore Pops Up In Film Deal With Fox
Spore is joining the ranks of Kane & Lynch and City of Heroes, with news that the life simulator could be heading to a theater near you. Someday. According to Variety, Twentieth Century Fox and EA are working together to develop an animated film based on Will Wright’s 2008 game, in which players nurture a civilization from their single-cell roots to become planet-hopping explorers. It’s not the first time that something like this has happened to Maxis; The Sims was optioned by Twentieth Century Fox back in 2007. EA proper also has films based on Army of Two, Dante’s Inferno, Dead Space, and Mass Effect in development.
Spore’s script is being written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, the minds behind Disney’s return to cel animation, The Princess and the Frog, and Ben Stiller’s The Return of King Doug. Blue Sky Studios, which worked on Ice Age and Robots, will be working on the CG production.
"I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation," said Chris Wedge, a writer/director/producer who’s worked on the Ice Age franchise. "From every perspective – visually, thematically and comedically – the world of Spore provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of story a game like Spore yields, considering how the game doesn’t follow a traditional narrative. Players develop their own stories as they advance their creatures’ evolution – a checkmark on the side of creativity, but something that’s bound to make Erb and Oremland’s jobs a bit more challenging.
Until we learn more, we’ll remain skeptical of the whole thing. Just because a film is in development doesn’t mean that it’ll ever come close to being released let alone even shot. And maybe we’re in the minority, but the words, “This would make an amazing movie!” were never uttered in our office in the years that Spore was in development. Then again, in issue 111 we did say of the then-upcoming The House of the Dead movie, “…The House of the Dead – The Movie certainly shows more promise than the disappointing Resident Evil feature that recently staggered through theaters.”
Could we be wrong about Spore – the Movie?
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