With such cute, tiny aliens, Space Invaders might seem like a difficult thing to put on the silver screen. Yet, their menacing march to earth as a single defender tries to stop them is perfect fodder for an invasion movie. Boil down the plot of Battle: Los Angeles, War of the Worlds, or Independence Day, and you’d probably get something similar. So, why has a film never been made?
Crossovers
In 2028, Taito’s alien-smash-’em-up will turn fifty. Yet, it has retained its place in the public’s consciousness for all of those years.
Space Invaders’ many sequels haven’t done quite as well as the arcade original (2002’s Space Invaders: Invasion Day is considered especially poor), but there aren’t many people out there who haven’t played the game or something it inspired, like Puppy Games’ 2012 Titan Attacks.
Taito has an interest in keeping Space Invaders relevant. The Japanese company recently partnered with Gaming Realms PLC to create an Invaders-themed Slingo experience. Listed among the slots on UK site Jackpot City Casino, Slingo Space Invaders mixes bingo with slot gameplay. The spinning reels provide the bingo numbers normally called by an announcer.
It’s not the first time Space Invaders has worked with another company. For instance, previous crossovers include Space Invaders × Pac-Man and Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders, both for mobile phones. The casino niche has become increasingly populated with media franchises, however.
A New Stage
Taito has been engaged with Hollywood since about 2010, according to a contemporary video from IGN. It took four years for the developer to settle on terms, and just another year before the project stalled. The aliens wouldn’t return to LA until 2019. Unfortunately, they failed to get their film made that time, too.
Fast-forward to 2025, where a new stage is set. Almost nothing is known about the new development(s), other than writers Ben Zazove & Evan Turner have been hired to write the script. That’s according to a Deadline article from August.
The writing duo chiefly works on action comedies, including the in-development buddy cop movie Officer Exchange (which resembles the 1998 Jackie Chan movie Rush Hour) and 2023’s The Out-Laws, which didn’t do well critically. What that means for a potential Space Invaders movie is up for debate.
The obvious problem is that Space Invaders is a) light on imagery, and b) almost entirely devoid of plot. Even the reboot mentioned above, Space Invaders: Invasion Day, only differed on the “mysterious aliens” motif by bringing it down to street level.
Source Material
Video game adaptations are not known for respecting the subject matter, with Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil suffering the worst insult to its source material. So, it’s probably fair to say that any prospective Space Invaders movie will move away from the game’s simplicity by necessity.
Will we see the classic rendition of Crab, Squid, and/or Octopus – the unofficial names of the Invaders – descending jerkily onto a stricken New York, or are we facing another low-budget CGI fest? Based on the project’s history, we may never know.
