Masi Oka's 'The Defenders' Given Green Light By DreamWorks

Elaine Low
June 9, 2009

masioka_nbc.jpgGamers, rejoice! Masi Oka is taking gaming mainstream. The Heroes star, a gamer himself, has come up with a movie project, The Defenders, which was just given the go-ahead by DreamWorks. The story follows a group of gamer teens who must surface from their online avatars to save the world, which is basically the daydream of many a MMORPG player. (That's massively multiplayer online role-playing games, for those of you not in the know.)

"You can be whoever you want to be," Oka said about gaming to the The Hollywood Reporter. " The question came to
me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?"

The project was picked up by DreamWorks after Oka pitched it to Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). Gary Whitta, a fellow World of Warcraft gamer and screenwriter of 2010 Denzel Washington action thriller Book of Eli, is attached to write the script.

Photo courtesy of NBC
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Comments

Comments

ffxi account wrote on Thu, 06/11/2009 - 12:27am
Ha! I always figured Masi Oka to be a true-gamer. I just hope that they don't butcher the movie and come up with something that all gamers could be proud of. Most of the game-based movies haven't really turned out well IMO.