At only a $79 million dollar budget, a major studio could just buy this project out and turn it into a shot at box office gold. In the Hollywood version, the spacecraft would wake up a dormant alien being, long buried underneath the lunar surface, or they'd start a chain reaction that would cause the moon to break up into a billion pieces, which would begin raining down on the Earth. Then NASA would have to hire a maverick space jockey — Eric Bana? — to either deal with the alien menace, or the falling debris.

Or what if the moon turned out to be a deep space probe that's been orbiting the planet for eons? Silently biding its time. Then, a rude awakening comes in the form of us crashing things into it and the bot pilots running the probe try to send down big guns to mete out some stellar justice. It feels like the start of a bad Dimension Films plot, we know. But, there's probably a good idea buried in there somewhere. Just as long as it doesn't dislodge the moon from orbit and force us to watch the only good scene in The Time Machine again.

NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer [Yahoo News]

Image from the 1902 George Méliès film A Trip To The Moon.

• David Hasselhoff: While the Hoff hasn't been attached to this planned revamp, his name is associated with it as much as William Shatner's is with Star Trek. He's enjoyed his run of popularity from soap star, to Michael Knight, to his role as Mitch Buchannon on Baywatch. He even managed to turn the lifeguard pseudo-drama into a cash cow for himself by getting it into first-run syndication, but you'd have to hit turbo boost many times to jump over his ego and the potential camp factor.
• Knight Rider 2000: This 1991 TV movie had high hopes to revitalize the series and bring Michael Knight and K.I.T.T. back onto American televisions. Here's a reader's digest version of the movie: A new Knight Industries has been working on a new supercar, this time a fire engine red sporty number. However, the new artificial intelligence is bitchy, and doesn't work well with Michael Knight, who has been brought in as a test driver. Michael finds out that the original K.I.T.T. has been sold for scrap, and they set to work finding the lost pieces of his cybernetic soul. They get everything back together except for one chip, and install the spit and baling wire gizmo into Michael's 1957 Chevy. On their first crime-busting trial run, K.I.T.T. accidentally shoots a tranq dart into James Doohan's neck as he withdraws money from an ATM. Yes, James Doohan plays James Doohan in the movie, and when he gets shot, he hallucinates and thinks he's actually Scotty from Star Trek. No, we aren't making this up. They track down the final chip, which happens to have been implanted in policewoman Shawn McCormick's head after a near-fatal shooting. K.I.T.T. is able to link with the chip wirelessly, and the three of them form a team. Ugh.
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• Knight Rider 2010: Yes, they went back to the well again in 1994 in yet another TV movie, this time without David Hasselhoff or William Daniels as the erudite voice of the car. It's set in a sort of Mad Max dystopian future, and the car is now a heavily modified armored 1969 Ford Mustang. Driver Jake McQueen finds out that the evil corporation trying to hire him to work on video games has evil ambitions, and partners with employee Hannah Tyree to take them down. She accidentally downloads her personality into a computer device called PRISM, dies, yet lives on as the voice and spirit of Jake's new car. Double ugh.
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• Team Knight Rider: Just when you thought it was safe, yet another Knight Rider appeared on TV. This 1997 series featured not one, but five talking vehicles with five new leads. Two motorcycles, a truck, an SUV, and a sportscar made up this new cadre of crimefighters. The show actually made it to series, and ran for 22 episodes before getting canceled due to low ratings. It was also a weekly advertisement for Ford, as all of the vehicles (except the motorbikes) were built Ford tough.
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• This Ain't Transformers: NBC is fast-tracking this project because of the huge numbers that Transformers pulled in over the summer, and the current script has K.I.T.T. able to morph into different types of cars, including an even sportier looking model, and a pink Barbie-mobile. A car that turns into another car? How exciting. Plus NBC has already been down the morphing-car road in 1994 with Viper.
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• The Stalled Movie Version: Hollywood has been trying since 2002 to get a film version of Knight Rider rolling, and attempts were made to cast both Ben Affleck and Orlando Bloom as the new Michael Knight. Currently the film rights are sitting at Miramax, with David Hasselhoff attached to at least have a cameo appearance in the film. There's a reason people keep turning this role down: to paraphrase Tina Turner, "We Don't Need Another Knight Rider."
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Somebody will rip off the CGI crap from Alien vs. Predator and create a menacing, drooling cybrid that's a human-rhino combination, or maybe a human-alligator? How about a human-bull combo, all horns and stompy menace? There will be long pseudo-scientific speeches, a funny "cybridizing" machine made out of an old HP printer, and of course the resulting cybrids will have the memories of the people whose DNA lives inside them. There will be a final scene where our intrepid "good" biologist (played by somebody like Sandra Bullock or Jeffrey Combs) has to fight the menacing cybrid by appealing to its humanity, and the pointy, muscled, tooth-faced creature will remember the mother or wife of the person whose DNA runs in its veins — a close-up will reveal that its oh-so-human eyes have filled with tears. In that weak moment, it will be shot in the head by the one military guy in the lab who hasn't succumbed to its fangs or poison or something. Right before the credits roll, we'll catch a glimpse of the eggs it laid in a lake or air vent or basement.

Come up with more bad movie ideas about cybrids by reading about them in Technology Review.