The culturalpocalypse is coming. Have you heard of the Madden Curse? If you’re one of the three people who hasn’t, it goes like this. If you’re put on the cover of Madden – the preferred video game of millions and millions of people – you’re fucked. Every single person who adorns the cover generally suffers malaise and awfulness that season. It’s become such a part of my generation’s collective conscious that the inevitable has happened:

EA is looking to exploit it.

In the form of a movie.

The project is being spearheaded by EA Entertainment VP Pat O’Brien, and the storyline seems simply riveting. This wonderful high-concept certain-abortion would “follow a former Madden video game champion who is forced out of retirement just as he finds himself on the corner of the game’s cover.” Whatever will he do then! It’s the sort of insane scenario that Max Barry riffs on in his novel Syrup, which if you haven’t checked it, you should. Shameless whoring of a favorite book of mine. Get some.

The culturalpocalypse? It’s sort of fun.

I like keeping it real with ya’ll. When I’m running on raw emotion, I’ll admit it. And so for full disclosure, I’ve bought both of the games I’m about to discuss.

The very same day that I report that Arkham Asylum has sold TWO MILLION ZOMG copies, EA CEO admits that Madden sales are dropping:

Via Kotaku:

Madden NFL 10 leads the NPD Group’s top ten with 928,000 units sold on the Xbox 360. That’s a drop from last year’s cool million. And while Madden sales were up year-over-year on the PlayStation 3, the game suffered on the PlayStation 2 and Wii, with the sports game moving less than half of what it did on the PS2 from the same period last year.

All told, Madden NFL 10 managed to move 1.9 million copies across all platforms in August, down from the 2.2 million-plus Madden NFL 09 managed last year.

Now listen, that’s still an insane amount of copies. But I’ve always looked at Madden as something primarily for frat boys and jocks. And not cool frat boys and cool jocks. There, I covered myself. So to see it getting outsold by a comic book character‘s video game makes me swell with glee. It’s juvenile, but I cackled a little bit to myself. Sorry EA! Sorry your recycled money-machine that really doesn’t change much every year isn’t printing out the cash like it usually does.

C’est la vie, blowhards!