Best to just accept that we live in a world of videogame movie adaptations, I think. The latest punchy-kicky tale to take its first steps on the way to the silver screen is Eternal Champions, a 1993 Sega game that arrived in the wake of the now much better-known Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Its characters range from Slash, who hails from 50,000 B.C., to futuristic Syrian bounty hunter Jonathan Blade, to the amusingly named Jetta Maxx, a Russian noble who was, if the game’s Wikipedia page is to be believed, “working undercover as a circus acrobat at the time of her death.”
Her death is relevant because of the game’s plot, which involves the characters being plucked away from the moment of each one’s death by one omniscient Eternal Champion, who has determined (for reasons) that mankind is in trouble on account of these wonderful folks and their untimely deaths. But alas and alack, the Eternal Champion can only bring one of them fully back to life. So, naturally, they have to fight for it.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Skydance is producing the cinematic masterpiece that is sure to result from this delightfully overwrought plot, and they’ve brought on Derek Connolly to write the film. Connolly, once upon a time, was known for being the writer of Safety Not Guaranteed, which shot both him and director Colin Trevorrow into the highest echelons of franchise filmmaking (which is to say, the Jurassic World series). While one might wish that Connolly would return to writing weird original science fiction films, he seems to be quite busy writing about dinosaurs, and who can blame him, really. (Connolly also, unfortunately, has a story credit on The Rise of Skywalker; he is also working on Wes Ball’s Legend of Zelda film.)
No production timeline or casting has been announced for Eternal Champions, but one does wonder who will play these nine snatched-from-the-jaws-of-death heroes.
