It's been a few months since we've broken a Jerry Bruckheimer producing story. No need to worry, he's back and this time he's setting his sites on a civil war epic. Bruckheimer has acquired the rights to "Shattered Union," a video game published by 2K Games, a division of Take-Two Interactive, which is also try to get "Bioshock" made at Universal. In the game, Washington D.C. is destroyed by a nuclear blast and, predictably, things get a little "Mad Max." What, you were expecting "Gettysburg 3?" Hit the jump for more details.

"Shattered Union" is a tactics based strategy game. The user controls one of six American factions (California Commonwealth, The Confederacy, Great Plains Federation, New England Alliance, Pacifica, The Republic of Texas), the peacekeeping European Union Occupation or the Alaska conquering Russians. The movie, to be written by J. Michael Straczynski ("Changeling"), sounds like another doomed to fail Gerard Butler vehicle at first but if it doesn't take itself too seriously it could be fun.

Incidentally, it looks like Straczynski is continuing to establish himself as an in-demand screen-writer. "Shattered Union" comes on the heels of this year's "Ninja Assassin" (Nov. 25) and in-development projects like "Silver Surfer," "Forbidden Planet," "World War Z" and "They Marched into Sunlight." It's always good to see a new writer break into the big leagues-for a while I was wondering if Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, David S. Goyer, Paul Haggis, et al. were attached to every promising script in Hollywood.

Video games rarely make for good films and the fact that "Shattered Union" was only able to garner middling reviews from most critics (7.9 from Gamespot, 7.5 from IGN) does not help. However, Bruckheimer was able to produce an immensely entertaining and popular franchise from a Disney theme park attraction. I just hope he doesn't call the film "The Day After 2012."