According to The Hollywood Reporter, DreamWorks has picked up The Defenders, a kid-friendly adventure story conceived by Heroes star Masi Oka, who plays Hiro on the show. The pic, to be produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, also has D.J. Caruso in negotiations to take on directing duties. Writer Gary Whitta is on board to pen the script.
The story centers on a group of mostly teenagers from around the world who are involved in a multiplayer video game, each unaware of who they really are behind the anonymity of their avatars. When trouble arises, they are forced to come together for a real world adventure and become accidental heroes in the process.
According to THR, DreamWorks will also develop a video game simultaneously with the feature. Oka had met Kurtzman and taken a couple of meetings with them, hoping to land a role in one of their movies. The pair was looking for “the kinds of movies that Amblin used to do, that combined an innocence with the adventure,” Orci said in the article.
Oka, also a fan of those types of movies, which for him are epitomized by Richard Donner’s 1985 hit The Goonies, pitched Kurtzman and Orci his idea and they loved it. And the rest, as they say, is cinematic history. Gotta love Hollywod. Gives hope for the rest of us — especially if “the rest of us” are also on hit tv shows and have access to big-time writers and producers.
