The problem with video game adaptation is often stretching a thin plot into feature length, meaning you've got to come up with a few more reasons why that guy is shooting everyone in sight, or why the aliens have declared war on us this time. So why not just take a video game with no plot and make it all up?

That seems to be the plan over at Twentieth Century Fox, where they've paired with Electronic Arts to make a movie out of Spore, a video game in which users build weird blobby creatures and create an entire universe out of them. Chris Wedge, who directed Ice Age for the studio, will direct, and told Variety, "I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation. From every perspective -- visually, thematically and comedically -- the world of Spore provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."

It's really no different than Peter Berg making a video game out of the plotless Battleship, but still really hard to imagine as a feature film. It all just feels ickily commercial, like the makers of Spore had run out of ways to make money on it, and figured this would work just as well. It also adds an even sadder layer to the saga of Chris Wedge, who tried to take a promising new project to Pixar, was yanked back into the Fox stable, and is now being punished with this. Have they no mercy?