Like everybody, when I heard the news that Warner, Mattel, and J.J Abrams’s Bad Robot are joining together to make a Hot Wheels movie I promptly…went about my day uncaring as if nothing had happened. At most, a joke about Lens Flares. But upon reflection, there may actually be a reason to eventually watch whatever comes out of this.
I would be remiss if I didn’t immediately go to compare it with its closest equivalent, Peter Berg’s Battleship. A movie about a board game about nothing that somehow ended up with a plot about aliens and Rhianna. It wasn’t a bad movie, just one whose existence is baffling. Out of everything that you could possibly do with Hasbro’s properties, why do a movie about Battleship? Did they think a comedy based on Monopoly would be long and monotonous? Perhaps they thought a CGI Candy Land would end up looking like a poor man’s imitation of Wreck-It Ralph’s Sugar Crush. The critics seem to give it a resounding ‘Meh’, the viewing public decided they wouldn’t take a chance and decided to watch The Avengers for the umpteenth time.
However, The concept it most reminds me of is actually 2014’s Need for Speed. Speaking about things that didn’t have a plot until they suddenly did. It was actually savaged by the critics instead of them reacting with a noncommittal shrug, but a Hot Wheels movie is likely going to take cues from it. Especially since Mattel will probably want to leverage the use of some of their more outlandish creations; taken away from the world of fantasy of die-cast and high-stakes racing which invariably ends up with one of the cars crashing into the nearest wooden furniture and into the dark and gritty compromises of a Hollywood Studio. Whatever plot they make is unlikely to be as charming as “rolling car down the loop and see if we can make it land into a mug”. Any characters it has are likely to have all of the depth of characterization of an RNG-created RPG character.
Then again, Need for Speed did $200M out of a $66M budget. So there’s something to be said for by-the-numbers characters and story so long as everyone present is aware of what it is and they have fun with the formula. Whatever happens, we’re likely to see outlandish displays and stunts that will make the Fast and Furious franchise seem positively quaint. All of it with that classic J.J Abrams cinematography that will make you appreciate the developments in HDR tech as the eye searing pain of a light being pointed straight at the camera does not hamper your enjoyment of the darker parts of the scene.
But however good, bad, or mediocre it ends up being, whether brought down to earth or having as much real life fixtures as the Speed Racer movie, I will be there queuing to see it. I and everyone else who had the car wash track as a perpetual fixture in their parents’ living room or was totally sure that their lime green anniversary Jaguar XKR was faster than the neighbors crummy matchbox AC Cobra. Not that he wouldn’t win anyway. The hood on his cobra lifted up.
Either that or it’s going to be stuck in an eternal development hell. Let’s not forget sometime in there he also entered an agreement to produce a Half-Life/Portal movie. Any day now…
AUTHORS NOTE: I should perhaps point out that the piece I wrote last week about GM deciding that they were stopping to produce the batteries of the Spark EV is now possibly irrelevant. A GM spokesperson got in touch with The Verge to confirm that they are still offering batteries for the Spark EV, but are suffering a temporal supply disruption. My points in the article should still stand, not to mention that there’s no guarantee that this wasn’t just GM trying to do policy by Braille.
