'Candyland' Adaptation Gets its Writers... Yay?!

Soooooooo... yeah, this is happening.  In case you didn't know, last year Universal signed a deal with Hasbro Toys to make films based on the company's properties (which is why we're getting Battleship and Stretch Armstrong).  Along with those two, one of the first properties to be optioned was the board game Candyland, to which we all laughed mockingly at the idiocy of the idea.

Well that laughter died today as the studio hired Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, the writers of Kung Fu Panda, to pen the script moving this film two spaces past the gumdrop forest and one step closer to reality.

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Liam Neeson Playing Naval Admiral in 'Battleship'

Battleship keeps getting weirder. Not Crispin Glover weird, but it has become anything but the movie that popped into everyone's mind when the board game adaptation was announced over a year ago. "Adaptation" seems an ill-fitting word; more than anything, it's just using the name of Hasbro's game with an entirely different set of circumstances.

So Peter Berg has aliens and Rihanna and supermodel Brooklyn Decker - the latter two should at least be pleasant distractions from the first, a real waste of this opportunity - and now it has Liam Neeson, whose career has really been in high gear since Taken was released.

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First Look: Rihanna On the Set of 'Battleship'

Looks like they're filming Battleship already. Either that or Rihanna's new music video will look suspiciously like Peter Berg's new board game hijacking/alien invasion flick. Here she is on the set in Louisiana, courtesy - not surprisingly - of RihannaPhotos.org.

As you can see, she's in the Navy, an experience The Village People touted 30-odd years ago, albeit for different reasons. And yes, if you're new to all of this, director Peter Berg, who is an avowed Naval history buff, is taking Battleship the board game and turning it into an aquatic Independence Day. It's hard not to ridicule the concept because it just seems to be two ill-fitting pieces. I'm certain we'll get emphatic dialogue like "But 75% of the Earth's surface is water!" and "Don't you realize what could happen if they infect the water!?!", which would segue into an environmental message. Think about it: A closing credits shot featuring the filthy North Pacific gyre. Powerful stuff -- we are the invaders, and we don't even know it! More Rihanna:

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Brooklyn Decker Boards 'Battleship'

She was rumored to be the replacement for Megan Fox in Transformers 3 for a short while, and now Latino Review says Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover model Brooklyn Decker has landed that first big movie role. She'll co-star in Peter Berg's mauling of the central concept of Hasbro's Battleship.

Models in movies are nothing new and Decker - who might have the coolest name in the history of hot chicks - handles herself in interviews a lot better than most, so maybe she has some natural ability. Well...clearly, she has some natural ability, but you know what I mean. You might argue that it takes more than a naturally easygoing presence to be an actor, and you could be right. However, this isn't about acting. This is Peter Berg slowing moving from being a Michael Mann knock-off to a Michael Bay knock-off because the money's better. So Decker will just have to look good and deliver a few short lines of emphatic dialogue.

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Rihanna Boards 'Battleship'

I heard an interesting development about Battleship the other that, on its own, wasn't a good enough reason to write it up. So we'll get there in a minute. First, the big casting news: The lovely Rihanna will co-star in Peter Berg's new board game adaptation that really isn't.

It will be the singer's film debut, and I have no idea what she'd be doing, and neither does Coming Soon, who broke the news. We do know that Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights, Wolverine) and Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, not Thor) will play brothers, and that's kind of strange, and we know that they're both Naval officers. But that's about it to this point.

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