You know, I wouldn’t figure that WarGames would have a significant influence thirty odd years out of its release, but I feel like it might be the fourth most popular choice for an elevator pitch ingredient I’ve heard over the years. “Such-and-such is WarGames meets these other movie.” That kind of thing. It's right up there with Die Hard in that respect.
If WarGames’ half-life in the popular imagination was depleting at all, it’s about to a new surge of radiation, because Deadline’s saying that MGM’s locked Seth Gordon to direct a remake fresh off of Horrible Bosses. If that seems like any kind of a thematic jump for the guy, keep in mind that he got his big break with the King of Kong, so this would actually bring him back to kind of marriage of gaming and movies that doesn’t pertain to MGS4-style 40 minute cut scenes.
Along with RoboCop, Carrie and the as-of-yet-unreleased Red Dawn, this is another quarter on the gaming cabinet dashboard que of remakes that the revived MGM’s got on its docket. The original movie really made Hackers look like hard-hitting realism when it came to depicting the wonderful world of computers, so we’ll see how much the story is jiggered with to make it more believable to today’s always-suspicious audiences.
