If Jaws is the greatest film ever made, then Mega Man is the greatest game series ever made (and I ain’t counting those Mega Man Xs and Mega Man Battle Networks and all that other poseur garbage. My blood runs pure Blue Bomber). I’ve often wondered how long it would take for some movie studio to idiotically think they could make a movie out of Capcom’s mascot, and today that idiot proudly announced itself as 20th Century Fox.
The Tracking Board reports that Fox and Chernin Entertainment (who have produced all the recent Planet of the Apes movies) have started development on a cinematic adaptation of Mega Man and his 8-bit universe. This is so early in the game that there’s nothing else worth reporting, so I’ll instead fill up this space on why making a Mega Man movie is a fool’s errand.
Sure, there is a fairly wide cast of characters and world to play with in the Mega Man franchise, and maybe an extremely talented writer (because they always save those for the video game movies) could find a way to weave together a satisfactory narrative, but they’d be missing the point of what makes Mega Man so enjoyable: the bosses and the levels.
Mega Man is often praised for having excellent level design and creative bosses, and those two things would simply become dressings to drape over a narrative. This is coming from someone who wrote outlines to six (loser status confirmed) Mega Man films back in high school, forming two separate trilogies that would tie in to the Mega Man X universe (loser status double confirmed), and I found that the stories didn’t really capture the fun of the games because the games are predicated upon exploring and conquering unique levels and their respective bosses. A movie can’t really focus on that, and such is the folly of attempting to make Mega Man into a movie.
But, if this does actually make its way to theater screens (I’m certain that the success/failure of Assassin’s Creed will heavily affect this project’s timeline), I’ll be there opening day, and I hope that the filmmakers can prove me wrong.
…And no, Christopher Lloyd shouldn’t play Dr. Wily.
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