Hollywood Has Finally Run Out of Ideas, So Now Pong Is Getting a Movie

Not every fucking thing needs to become a movie.

That really shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but Hollywood has spent the last several years treating every remotely recognizable name, character, toy, game and breakfast cereal like an untapped cinematic universe.

Now they’ve reached Pong.

Universal Pictures has made a deal with Atari covering potential movies based on ten classic games: Adventure, Asteroids, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong and Yars’ Revenge.

The first project reportedly moving forward is Adventure, which at least technically contains a character, a castle and something resembling a goal.

Then there’s Pong.

A game about two white rectangles knocking a square back and forth.

That’s it.

There are no characters. There is no world. There is no story. Nobody is protecting a kingdom, avenging a murdered family or trying to find their way home.

Nolan Bushnell looked at table tennis and said, “How can we make this into an even more basic video game?” Allan Alcorn said, “Hold my beer,” and Pong was born. I did the same thing in a computer lab in 6th grade! Where's my goddamn movie!?!

Recognizable Is Not the Same Thing as Cinematic

There is nothing really wrong with Pong as a game.

It is one of the most important video games ever made. It helped establish an entire industry and gave millions of people their first experience playing something on a television screen.

That doesn’t mean it needs a fucking movie.

A toaster was also an important invention. Universal doesn’t need to announce the Toast Cinematic Universe with Chris Pratt voicing a rebellious slice of sourdough. Shit, I hope they never read that...

Some things can simply remain what they are.

Games can be games. Toys can be toys. Cartoons can be cartoons. Movies can even occasionally be movies instead of two-hour commercials for the next seven movies.

The question should always be whether someone has a story worth telling. Instead, studios seem to begin with a list of things people recognize and then force writers to reverse-engineer a reason for those things to appear on a screen for 100 minutes.

They aren’t looking for stories. They’re looking for logos.

Did Everyone Forget About Pixels?

By the way we already made this movie. It was called Pixels, it came out in 2015 and besides the always incredible Peter Dinklage, that movie was a steaming pile of Pac-Man shit.

That movie had Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Centipede, Space Invaders and nearly every other arcade character capable of triggering nostalgia in anyone old enough to remember when Pizza Hut still had dine-in.

It had Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Monaghan and Chris Columbus directing. Giant arcade characters attacking Earth, expensive visual effects and enough recognizable gaming imagery to fill an abandoned shopping mall arcade.

It still fucking sucked.

Pixels was the cinematic equivalent of somebody rattling a bucket of arcade tokens in your face for nearly two hours while repeatedly asking whether you remembered the 1980s.

The movie demonstrated exactly why recognition alone isn’t enough. Nostalgia can get someone’s attention. It cannot replace characters, jokes, pacing or a story anyone gives a shit about. Pixels should have been the warning that stuffing old arcade games into a movie doesn’t automatically create entertainment.

Instead, Hollywood appears to have studied that steaming pile of shit and reached the opposite conclusion. The problem wasn’t that Centipede couldn’t carry a movie. The problem was that Centipede had to share one.

The Centipede Doesn't Deserve a Movie

That seems to be the lesson here. Why cram all these games into a single terrible movie when each one can become its own terrible movie? Why settle for one disappointing weekend when you can spread the disappointment across an entire decade?

Just imagine the possibilities!

Asteroids becomes a $200 million space epic about a disgraced pilot who must confront the rocks that killed his father and kidnapped his son.

Missile Command becomes a grim political thriller about a military officer forced to choose which cities survive.

Breakout follows a hardened former prisoner who must destroy an endless wall, one brick at a time by throwing a ball at it.

Centipede becomes a horror movie about a giant insect, which honestly sounds less ridiculous than most of the others until someone announces the prequel series explaining how it became a millipede.

Then comes Pong. Fucking Pong!

Hollywood will give each paddle a tragic backstory. One will be voiced by Timothée Chalamet. The other will be Awkwafina. The square will be a glowing interdimensional artifact capable of destroying the universe. The paddles will begin as rivals before learning that the real game was friendship all along.

A post-credit scene will reveal a ship, setting up Yars’ Revenge.

Three years later, we’ll get Pong: Across the Paddleverse.

None of this sounds impossible anymore, and that is just sad.

Original Ideas Didn’t Disappear

People keep saying Hollywood has run out of original ideas. It hasn’t. Writers have original ideas every day. Filmmakers are trying to make them. There are scripts sitting on desks, laptops and hard drives right now that contain actual characters, new worlds and amazing stories.

The studios just don’t want to take risks.

An original movie has to convince people to care about something unfamiliar. That requires marketing, confidence and occasionally allowing a filmmaker to make something that hasn’t already been focus-tested across four generations.

A Pong movie comes with a name people recognize. That's apparently enough. Studios have become so terrified of uncertainty that they would rather spend millions creating a backstory for basic geometry than go outside and find the next great original screenplay.

They can’t take their dicks out of their hands long enough to look.

Every piece of nostalgia must be stripped for parts. Every childhood memory must be monetized. Every title sitting in a corporate filing cabinet must be transformed into content.

Not because someone has a brilliant idea for it.

Because somebody owns it.

Pong doesn’t need lore. It doesn’t need celebrity voices. It doesn’t need a tragic origin story or a streaming spinoff about what the left paddle was doing before the ball arrived. It certainly doesn’t need a cinematic universe. It needs two paddles, one square and somebody willing to accept that not every fucking thing has to become a franchise.