The Last Starfighter reboot will be a movie, not a tv series. The original 1984 cult film starring Lance Guest is a spacefaring sci-fi fantasy wherein a small-town teenager named Alex Rogan finds himself recruited to join an intergalactic war due to his groundbreaking high score on a video game. In support of its out-of-this-world premise, The Last Starfighter carries the distinction of being one of the earliest CGI laden features.
Gary Whitta, co-developer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, announced a while back that he was working with the writer of the original Last Starfighter, Jonathan Betuel, to relaunch the epic, some 35+ years since it initially took flight. Whitta posted concept art for the new Last Starfighter on his Twitter account, conceived by Matt Allsopp, the lead concept artist for Rogue One. From there, Whitta refrained from offering too much further info, as not wanting to give away any spoilers, but this left fans speculating what this new iteration of the 80’s classic could entail.
One such speculation was that the Last Starfighter reboot could be a television series, but a recent interview with Betuel, detailed in Moviehole.net, revealed that it would not and would be a feature film. Addressing the rumor, Betuel stated: “... that was a misfire from a wishful TV producer at the time. This is a movie with all the bells and whistles, and it won’t presuppose that you’ve seen the original film.” In the interview, Betuel mentions that it had taken a lot of time to secure the rights back to The Last Starfighter, but now that he’s done so, he and Whitta have clear sailing towards finally completing the script.
The original film ended with a bit of a cliffhanger — Alex, alongside his girlfriend Maggie, played by Catherine Mary Stewart (Weekend at Bernie’s) rejoins the Rylan Star League to help in their continued conflict against the Ko-Dan forces. He leaves behind his mom and his younger brother, who then begins his own training on the same Starfighter video game that made Alex a legend. Betuel states that this new Last Starfighter will have the leads of the previous film all grown up with children of their own, and the story will focus on the passing of the heroic torch to the next generation.
Though not the success of Tron, the Star Wars trilogy, or other epics it borrowed from in its day, The Last Starfighter was able to capture an escapist adventure fantasy that remains timeless. Video games are an undeniable force in pop-culture, and with modern-day advances in AR and VR, this marks the perfect time to reboot The Last Starfighter. Colossal classic hits such as Halo and hot, currently trending titles like Among Us reaffirm the excitement that being fully immersed in a space saga can bring. Alex Rogan’s dreams brought audiences to the edge of the stars. It will be a thrill to see how much further beyond this new Starfighter film will take viewers.
Source: Moviehole.net