Whether you’re ready for it or not, Universal is about to turn a board game you grew up with as a kid into one of the biggest movies of 2012 (right now it’s set to hit Memorial Day weekend of that year). Yup, Battleship – that game remembered more for its tagline (“You sunk my Battleship!”) than anything else – is gearing up to become a major motion picture that will be directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Hancock).
Heat Vision now reports that the casting process has begun, with Taylor Kitsch landing a starring role as the “wildly spirited” Naval commander Alex Hopper. It had been between Kitsch and The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner, however Renner bowed out due to scheduling conflicts with another film. Kitsch may not be immediately familiar to you, but if you watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine, then you know him as the guy who played Gambit. He’s also been featured on the TV version of Friday Night Lights, and appears to be an actor who’s slowly climbing the familiarity charts.
In the film, an international fleet of five ships will band together to help battle a sizable group of water-bound aliens called the Regents, which were described as looking somewhat like the character of Davey Jones did in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
Do you think Battleship has a chance to “wow” audiences, or is it totally lame to be actually adapting a board game into a big-budget summer blockbuster?
