Oregon Trail 'action comedy' film in the works from Apple GenXers and elder millennials, rejoice – or maybe don't: An Oregon Trail movie is on the way from Apple. Billed as an "action comedy," it's been confirmed to The Register that Apple's film studio has accepted a pitch from duo Will Speck and Josh Gordon to direct the film. The movie will be based on the classic computer game …
It could be sort of a Jumanji / Zathura type movie where people get pulled into a game that's like real life, it could be like Pixels where you play the game but with real world consequences, or it could be a Blazing Saddles like period piece with a lot of silly jokes. Any of them have potential to be really good, and potential to be really terrible. Though Apple seems to do pretty well with its movies (I really liked Luck) they don't make a lot but they are generally of high quality. Most people don't see them since most don't subscribe to Apple TV+
Well, if it features Calamity Jane, it could be a hit at least in France (IMHO)!
An appetizer or alternative watch is 1883, a prequel to Yellowstone, and, IMHO, a big upgrade on the latter. 10 episodes only, duly tied up at the end and doesn't meander around with an overcomplex plot, letting the trail itself be the star.
That or the ever-watchable Ravenous which... is not a movie to watch before sitting down for a steak dinner.
Both benefit from great acting and production values as well.
Action comedy seems like an odd fit here. We'll see.
the overland route from Missouri across the unsettled American West
I imagine the native americans across the (soon to be) American West were quite settled until the hordes of trekking American opportunists started shooting their bison, them and generally dispossessing the poor buggers.*
* not that AU was much better in this respect.
Even in terms of Europeans, Oregon and California were not empty. If the Hudson Bay Company had not sold supplies and bought grain from the first wagon train settlers, they would never have made it. The Willamette and Tualatin valleys had a mix of farmers (many retired Hudson Bay Company men married to native women), missionaries, and trappers when they showed up. A few traders had outposts along the route already and expanded as overland settlers became a steady business.
So we've had remakes/reboots of every 80s movie, every 80s TV series and now we're basing movies on USA-only 'educational' computer games.
What's the next 'inspiration' for the 50 somethings who are now in charge of the studios?
DOS 3.2 the movie? A horror series based on getting all the protected mode drivers in the right order in config.sys ?
> now we're basing movies on USA-only 'educational' computer games.
El Reg is aimed by default at a US audience now, so you'll get a story taking for granted that you're nostalgic for an artifact of someone else's childhood in another country that had nothing to do with yours and you'll like it!
Could this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(TV_series)] be the series you are describing? A pilot plus 13 episodes.
"NBC cancelled the show after six episodes, but the remaining seven episodes were later aired on BBC 2 in the UK,[3] and the entire series was shown in the UK on BBC1 from November 1977 to January 1978. "
What's all this about foisting off left-pondian cultural artifacts on the UK? As written, it appears as if the second half of the series, never broadcast in the US, was popular enough in the UK to support acquiring the rights to the whole thing and putting it in the esteemed BBC1 lineup.
I'm kinda sorry I missed it - in 1977 I was in graduate school, and didn't have much spare time for television watching. I do recall going to Star Wars (tm) with my future wife and a couple of friends. We spent some time on the way home trying to figure out what the fuss was about. I was particularly disappointed that after 2001 finally got the spaceship noises right, we had to go back to spaceships that went woosh, and energy weapons that went "pew pew". Doesn't explain why I like Star Trek so much, though. Maybe R2D2 should have fallen over more. That moment in the trailer was one of the main reasons I wanted to see the film. But that was a rare humorous moment in a pretty solemn entertainment.
If they made a film of MS-DOS, it would be a pointlessly tedious and messy affair that had started out as an uncredited ripoff of another rather basic and already-dated movie from several years prior. One that was then tarted up piecemeal in dribs and drabs in successive failed attempts to make the plot appear more modern and big-budget than it was, but which instead resulted in a disjointed, convoluted and downright tedious pile of crap that no-one who knew better would have any respect for.
Regardless, all that *would* be excused as "just the way things were back then" by people who didn't know any better because they hadn't seen the much better but far less successful "AmigaOS Movie" movie that juggled numerous plotlines at once without falling over yet ultimately got written off by those same people as just a bunch of pretty effects.
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No money in that, I assume it's more profitable to pander to the nostalgia of the Yank market and hope that everyone else is happy to get dewey-eyed over the memory of a game they never played running on a computer that was mostly unknown in UK schools compared to the ubiquitous BBC Micro.
FWIW, I never got the fuss about Chuckie Egg personally, but that's beside the point.
the team behind it is helmed by the same people who created less-than-successful TV shows like Cavemen, a short-run series based on Geico insurance commercials, and movies Blades of Glory and Office Christmas Party.
So if you want to have some laughs on the Oregon Trail, it might be a good idea to stick to the game - who knows when that movie'll be out, or if it'll even be worth watching. ®
THIS ^^^
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