Coming out of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, one of the more interesting documentaries that was getting a lot of attention was a movie called King of Kong, about two hardcore gamers battling for the world record high score in Donkey Kong. New Line and Picturehouse ended up obtaining distribution rights in North America and outside North America respectively; in addition, New Line snagged the rights to do a remake. Now it looks like this remake is moving forward, as they are fast-tracking the project and hired Michael Bacall (Manic, Bookies) to pen the script.

This certainly won’t be the first documentary to be turned into a fictional feature film, and being a game nerd myself I’m pretty curious to see how it turns out. I can’t help but think that Napoleon Dynamite is going to be the point of reference for what they’re attempting here, but I hope it’s something a little more than that. The interesting thing is that King of Kong director Seth Gordon will also be helming the remake, which should invite plenty of comparisons between the fiction and non-fiction versions of this story. In the meantime, King of Kong will get a limited theatrical release on August 17th. For those interested, there was also a similar doc playing at Sundance this year called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade (it even featured some of the same subjects).

You can check out the trailer for King of Kong on YouTube, and the trailer for Chasing Ghosts on Google Video.

Around the Web: