An interview with Capcom’s Corporate Officer Toshihiro Tokumaru has revealed some interesting tidbits about the Lost Planet movie in production… namely, that they’ve got incredibly high goals for the film.
Sure, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li doesn’t appear to have much of a budget (I believe Chris Klein will work for a t-shirt and a warm bowl of soup nowadays) but Lost Planet‘s way too epic- we’ve got giant alien monster bugs, a snowy landscape, and mechs! For something like that they’d need a ton of cash!
In the middle of the interview Toshihiro talks a bit about the Street Fighter adaptation before dropping a bombshell- Speaking of Lost Planet, that project will cost somewhere between 150 and 200 million dollars to make. The producer on the project is Avi Arad, producer of Spider-Man. I think that it is because of our original IPs that we are able to try something so ambitious.
He also mentions that they developed the story far beyond the lame duck version we were shown in the game.
When the game creators at Capcom develop a game, they think about everything from the main characters to the setting, which makes it easy to bring our games to the big screen. In game-making, we consider the main character’s upbringing, interpersonal relationships, and their place in time. But in a game we can only show a cross-section of that. In Lost Planet for example, we can show the game’s protagonist on a distant planet fighting against various foes, but we can’t really show his interpersonal relationships. By developing that part of it on the movie screen, we can add substance to that world and expand it
But it’s hard to get past that price tag. It just seems like a crazy risk. Lost Planet doesn’t even have the name recognition of Dead Rising, let alone any of Capcom’s other IPs. David Hayter (voice of Solid Snake, writer of both the X-Men series and Watchmen) will write the screenplay, and it’s been said that Lost Planet was developed with a film in mind from the start so at least there’s that. And hell, if they do it well it could be something incredibly epic and exciting- just with the landscape and enemies alone this could be something different. Read my review of the game here and wonder how it would translate to screen.