In financial news last week, United States toymaker Hasbro pulled the plug on its plan to buy Dreamworks, the animation company behind such films as Shrek and Kung Fu Panda. I don't know anything about big business but apparently something happened involving someone's share prices going down and the ghost of Walt Disney not being happy, and suddenly the deal was off. I think this is a great pity and a loss to all humanity.
Hasbro makes every toy and game under the sun, and is already responsible for many of the greatest toy-meets-movie films: the Transformers series; the G.I. Joe series; and Battleship, the best Rihanna film ever. But imagine, if you will, a world where Hasbro has their own film studio at their beck and call, ready to turn even more Hasbro products into cinematic masterpieces. Imagine, if you can, some of the cinematic masterworks a Hasbro-Dreamworks studio could have unleashed on holiday audiences all over the world.
Furby would tell the story of a furby, called Furby, who looks like a normal furby but is actually the chosen furby here to lead the other furbies to their promised land of Furbyland. In this biblical parable, Russell Crowe would star as the one person on the planet who can understand the furby language of furbish and who builds an arc to transport the furbies to Furbyland, and also defend them from the hordes of angry parents whose young daughters are crying because their furbies have risen up and broken the shackles of toy slavery.
Risk would star Matthew Broderick and would be a sort-of-sequel to his 1983 film WarGames, crossed with the 1995 Robin Williams film, Jumanji. A now-middle-aged Matthew, with his lovely wife (a career resurrection for Ally Sheedy) would sit down with their three clean-cut American kids to play a game of Risk, the game of world domination. As they play, in their hyper-competitive family way, they realise that everything that happens in their game - every battle, every invasion of Kamchatka - is happening in the real world. They stop playing the game but the game keeps going until, eventually, they must work together as a family to win the game and defend the last remaining continent: North America.
Nerf: Alien Armageddon would be, as the title implies, a Michael Bay film about an alien invasion of Earth. No conventional weapon - not even nuclear weapons - can stop the aliens, who have ravaged every corner of the world and are now closing in on fortress America. The President of the United States (Will Smith) is facing imminent defeat when his children (Jaden Smith and Willow Smith) shoot their Nerf blasters at the one alien creature they have captured and are studying in a secret basement/lab under the White House and blow it to green slimy pieces. For reasons that only a crazy government scientist (Jeff Goldblum) can explain, foam Nerf bullets are able to penetrate all the alien force-fields and armour; and also coming into contact with foam causes the aliens to explode in a cinematic fashion. Oh, kids are also invisible to the alien radar. So, for the last two hours of the film, Jaden and Willow lead an army of kids in exploding all the alien invaders with their Nerf blasters.
