Two years ago, we brought you the news when Universal Pictures won a four studio bidding war for the rights to the classic Atari video game Asteroids. At that time, Matthew Lopez (The Race to Witch Mountain) was set to write the script, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers: Dark of the Moon) was set to produce the film.

In June we brought you an update on the project, because Universal Pictures was courting disaster director du jour, Roland Emmerich (Anonymous) to helm the film. Just two weeks after that was reported, Sony Pictures acquired the distribution rights to Roland Emmerich‘s sci-fi project, entitled Singularity, and the studio also scheduled a May 17th, 2013 release date for the film.

Now, during an interview with the good folks over at Collider, Emmerich had this to say about the possibility of directing the Asteroids adaptation:

“Nope. I was very honored that they wanted to have me as a director, and I kind of liked the script very much, but at that time I was writing with my writing partner Harold Kloser a new script called Singularity and I opted for that.”

Emmerich also gave a small update on the progress of Singularity:

“We already got started, so we’re in pre-production and we probably will shoot end of March as it looks right now, and it takes place in the future 40 years from now. It’s like kind of this moment where computer technology is so advanced that we kind of—It’s the danger of losing control.”

Singularity is slated to hit theaters on May 17th, 2013.