Man, is Peter Dinklage packing a hellacious mullet for 2015’s ‘Pixels’

Pixels, inspired by a wildly popular 2010 short that saw New York under attack by classic video game characters, will star Dinklage, Adam Sandler, Kevin James and Josh Gad (most recently of Frozen). Entertainment Weekly has the first look at the heroes in uniform.

Sandler, Gad and Dinklage (with Michelle Monaghan, above) are the “Arcaders,” basically, slacker buddies of the President (James), recruited to repel an alien invasion based on the absurd misunderstanding that our 1980s video games were threats broadcast to extraterrestrial civilizations. Considering the nostalgia involved, someone had to pull mullet duty and that was assigned to Dinklage.

Director Chris Columbus says that, despite the homages to games more than 30 years old, people “are going to be seeing things that they’ve never seen before.

“To be quite honest, a lot of visual effects movies cover the same territory whether it’s destroying a city or superhero visual effects, they tend to have a certain amount of intense HD reality,” Columbus said. “We’re taking classic eight-bit characters and turning them into fully realized, three-dimensional, pixelated characters that are quite threatening.”

For more about the origins of Pixels, see Polygon’s discussion with Patrick Jean, who created the original short that gave rise to this feature production.