Video game adaptations officially reach bottom of barrel as Eternal Champions movie announced

Did you hear that, friends? That *screeeeeeeech* way off somewhere in the distance, out Hollywood way? That’s the bottom of the video game movie adaptation barrel being finally, well, and truly scraped, as THR reports this week that a film adaptation of forgotten 1993 Sega Genesis fighting game Eternal Champions has just gone into development.

If you aren’t familiar with Eternal Champions, congratulations: You were either too young, or too lucky, to experience the ultimate childhood humiliation of having your friends come over to play video games, ask if you had Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat, and then slowly crumple into disappointment when you brought Sega’s corporate-owned knock-off out instead. Featuring such fighting game luminaries as “Shadow,” “Slash,” and the powerful roast beef cyborg “R.A.X.,” it’s an also-ran fighting game that we’d assumed had been forgotten by everybody but serious “Weird video game peripheral*” perverts. But now, apparently, it’s getting a movie treatment from Skydance, with Derek Connolly writing the script.

*Welcome to the Weird Video Game Peripheral perverts sidebar. So, here’s the history: Eternal Champions‘ most notable feature—beside “Midknight,” a guy who got turned into a vampire mutant after committing chemical warfare during the Vietnam War—was that it was only one of a very small number of video games that worked with Sega’s Activator controller, which was a ring you put on the ground and stood in the middle of. You controlled your actions with the Activator by punching and kicking over the sensors in the ring, attempt to beat your siblings or friends in fighting games before they could die of laughter from watching your goofy ass flail. It was such a terrible way to control a fighting game that Eternal Champions automatically handicapped players if it detected them using the Activator, to give them bonus damage and health, but the system had no way to similarly shield them from the social stigma of its use.

Anyway: Connolly was Colin Trevorrow’s go-to co-writer for a long time, including penning a script that never got used for the movie that eventually became Rise Of Skywalker. Lately he’s developed his own identity as a guy who gets tapped to write video game movie screenplays for video game movies we half-suspect will never happen: He’s been attached to Metal Gear movie projects, as well as Wes Ball’s long-gestating Zelda film adaptation.

And, we’re just going to say it: People yelled at us when we suggested the Mario movie making a billion dollars was going to herald a lot of bad movies in the future, but this thing is only getting made because Sega owns the rights to it and the Sonic movies made decent money, so… We’re just saying.