The two firms have acquired rights to the Capcom third-person shooter and will develop the material as a feature. The companies said the project would be a “potential starring vehicle” for Pitt. No writers have been hired yet.

“Void” centers on a cargo pilot named Will (Pitt’s presumed character) who, after crashing in the Bermuda Triangle, ends up in a parallel universe where a band of humans must fight an alien threat that had long been thought extinct. Will and the other humans are outmanned but have a number of weapons and powers to help them beat back the alien incursion.

The game will be released for Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in January.

The project is the first to come out of a development partnership between Plan B and Reliance that was announced at the Cannes festival in 2008. The Indian giant has deals with a number of other Hollywood production banners, including Julia Roberts’ Red Om and George Clooney’s Smokehouse.

Video games have had a mixed record on the big screen, with title likes “Max Payne” mutating into critical and commercial flops. But executive involved in this deal pointed to the advantages a “Dark Void” movie would have over its predecessors.

“As a game, ‘Dark Void’ was developed with a wide-screen mentality — a world full of adventure presented in cinematic scope and scale,” Capcom senior vice president of licensing Germaine Gioia said.

The piece points to recent low-budget and star-free fare like The Hangover, District 9, and Paranormal Activity that each went on to be wildly successful, and contrasts them with big-budget, star-studded flops like A Christmas Carol, Land of the Lost, and Funny People. The overall lesson seems to be that star-power doesn’t have nearly the draw that it used to, and that budgets aren’t much of a factor for audiences either.

But of course, I don’t really think this is news to most of us. While some general audiences overwhelmingly support movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I don’t think they did so for hunky Shia LaBeouf. Instead, they were probably looking to revisit the magic from the first film–which, let’s face it, was far better than it had any right to be. (Or the simpler answer, they just wanted to see things blow up.)

In any case, it was the quality of the concept of Transformers 2 (magic revisited and/or ‘splosions) that most likely led audiences showing up in droves, and not stars. You could apply a similar logic to The Hangover and its ilk mentioned above. I’d like to believe that audiences are smarter than we give them credit for—or at the very least, most can tell when studios are pushing crap on them. And sometimes they completely surprise us, just look at how well Inglourious Basterds performed.

Ultimately, the success of these lower budget features is a good thing for cinema. It makes studios less uneasy about moving forward with low budget features, and opens the doors for innovative new projects down the line. And after all, releasing several smaller features instead of relying on returns from a few big-budget films is a much safer bet for them as well.

JUSTICE LEAGUE TRAILER:
The world is about to end and aliens are attacking us!! It’s up to Superman and the Justice League to stop them and save us. Ok, it’s not real but check out the trailer.

Here is another Thundercats Trailer: