After Battleship: Ouija

Brian Goldner, the President and CEO of toy and game company Hasbro, plans to continue taking board games cosmic following next week's release of Battleship. In a conversation with USA Today at last night's Battleship premiere, Goldner revealed that Hasbro (also the company behind Transformers) is currently developing a film version of Ouija, an activity that involves attempting to commune with the spirit realm by use of a small board not unlike a tabletop game, with Universal Studios. The project had bounced around a bit before finally landing at Universal in March, but until now Hasbro had mentioned nothing more about it since. While Hasbro sells a version of the "game," it's not a concept they can completely own the trademark on and a quick IMDb search reveals three projects titled Ouija scheduled to open in 2012 or 2013. In case you're still struck with a case of the giggles by the iconic board game being reinvented as an alien invasion action flick, Goldner also had a few thoughts on how that happened. It's a change he attributes to director Peter Berg, of Friday Night Lights fame, who brought Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) to Battleship with him from that show. "Early on as we thought about making the movie we thought it would be antiquated to think about countries going up against on another," Goldner told USA Today. "So early on Pete had this idea, what happens if this alien reconnaissance team came to the sea, met up with this force, and then we had to investigate?" Doesn't it seem likely that years from now, if this film is still discussed at all, film buffs will look back on that quote and say, "Oh, so THAT'S what happened there!"?