It’s been years since The Last Starfighter ignited our imaginations as kids. When the movie came out in 1984, it was definitely ahead of its time. Fast forward to the last ten years, and a lot of us have been waiting for the chance to see a reboot of the movie that has now become a classic. Everything good during that time has been remade already after all, so what’s taking it so long to remake The Last Starfighter?
It wasn’t like nobody was trying because apparently, Gary Whitta has been courting rights-holder Jonathan Beutel to work with him for a while now. If you’re not familiar with Gary Whitta’s screenwriting work, let’s just throw in a few names in there including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Book of Eli. According to Whitta, he’s been trying to reboot Starfighter for some time now, but Beutel blatantly refused to sell the rights to the film. Actually, Beutel claimed then that he would never, ever sell the rights–not even to Seth Rogen or Steven Spielberg.
But that was then, and this is now. Times have changed and so has Beutel’s mind. We’re not entirely sure what spawned the change of heart. It might have very well been Whitta’s determination and persistence, but who knows and who really cares. The project is moving and it’s heading towards the right direction. Back in 2015, there had been rumors that a virtual reality show was in the works. Well those aren’t rumors anymore as Whitta himself posted screenshots of what he had been working on alongside Beutel.
In the Instagram post, Whitta noted that Beutel is now his co-writer on the project. He also thanked Matt Allsopp, who just happens to be the lead concept artist on Rogue One, for designing the concept images that Whitta posted online. The four images showed on the post were nothing short of exciting. They showed a variety of spacecraft in motion in landscape shots. If that isn’t enough to get you excited, you should look on to something else Whitta posted. On another post, Whitta had a picture of the main character Alex Rogan standing in front of the Starfighter arcade game. That’s surely enough to open the floodgates of nostalgia for us.
Whitta stated that as soon as he got to talk with Beutel about the original film, talks about a new version came about just naturally. Since then, they’ve spent hours upon hours just reimagining the world of Starfighter. Before they both knew it, they had a developed story to work with.
Seth Rogen’s name happened to be tagged along in one of the posts, and we wondered whether he was involved somewhat. All Whitta said is that they’ve chatted about the project online, but Whitta thinks that Rogen will be amazing as one of the central characters, Centauri. We can definitely picture that as well, and the thought of it is doing nothing else other than just get us excited even more for the upcoming film.
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