Battleship Down: Board Games the Movie!

The battle for earth begins at sea. The battle for boredom begins with seeing this movie.

The other day I watched a You Tube clip and the unskippable movie preview at the beginning caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. A naval fleet leaves port to begin war games and encounters an alien enemy hidden beneath the sea. Within seconds I knew the movie was going to be terrible, but something in the rapid sequence of clips showing overwrought acting and mind-numbing special effects managed to hold my attention as I came to the shocking realization: This is a movie based on the board game Battleship.

On the heels of financially successful, but terrible movies based on toys, Transformers and GI: Joe, movie studio Universal Pictures has secured rights to release a series of movies based on board games. Plans for future movies based on games include Candyland, Monopoly, Clue, and Ouija.

Movie studios are searching for anything with any built-in brand or name recognition, realizing they don’t need to make a good movie if enough cavemen walk past the theater and a familiar name sparks a flame of recognition: “Me see name I know. Me see movie.”

And Battleship isn’t being made on the cheap either; the movie is budgeted for $250 million dollars, although I’m not sure how much of that money was budgeted to the cast, which includes first time actors such as Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker and singer Rihanna. But those pretty faces don’t need to worry about any heavy lifting in the acting department because Oscar nominee Liam Neeson has signed on to lend the film much-needed gravitas.

I hope Hollywood doesn’t stop at the current slate of board game movies because I have a few other suggestions for terrible movies they might be interested in:

Hungry, Hungry Hippos: The Movie
A zookeeper who can communicate with animals tries to convince his superiors that the hippos are much hungrier than the President of the United States realizes. Will the zookeeper cut through the bureaucratic tape in time to feed those hungry, hungry hippos before it’s too late?

Trivial Pursuit: Science & Nature Category’s Revenge
A honeymoon turns tragic when the happy couple play a game of trivial pursuit and neither are able to land on any category other than Science and Nature, realizing too late that they’re honeymooning on an ancient Indian burial ground.

Uno the Movie: Curse of the +4 Wild Card
A wise teacher uses a card game of green, blue, red, and yellow colors to show a group of racially-diverse teenagers that the color of our skin doesn’t matter near as much as our talent at card games.

Connect Four
Will a plucky group of kids convince the government to accept it’s help in connecting four before the world ends for some reason?

Pictionary
In a land where speaking or writing letters was forbidden, one man dares to dream of a better life and inspires his fellow Nonspeakingnonwritians through a series of rapidly sketched pictures.

If Hollywood is looking for movie concepts that we’ll all recognize and robotically go to see, regardless of movie quality, movie studios might next consider making movies based on food.

Top Ramen: The Movie
A starving orphan discovers a magical packet of noodles that just may contain the key to his survival. But can he find the land of boiling water before time runs out?

Microwave Frozen Pizza: Totino’s Knows What You Did Last Summer
When a phone call coming from inside the house distracts a young, attractive college student, she forgets to take the pizza out of the oven and covers up the burned evidence…or did she…yes, she did…or did she?

Macaroni and Cheese: Dairy’s Revenge
A group of high school seniors spend a weekend at an old lake house near a creepy abandoned resort full of boxes of Macaroni and Cheese. But did anyone bring milk and butter?

Any other movie ideas?