Sega Wants To Make Altered Beast and Streets of Rage Movies
Sega founded a production company called Stories International in 2011 with the intended goal of turning their game properties into movies. So far their only lure that caught a lunker was Shinobi, which producer Mark Pratt purchased the rights to. Now Streets of Confusion, the outfit that makes Fear The Walking Dead and Powers, may be interested in movie-fying Altered Beast and Streets of Rage, two ancient beat-em-ups from the Genesis era. What these proposed movies would be like is anybody’s guess; neither game had much of a storyline.
Sega is not alone in its pursuits; there are at least two Hitman movies out there thanks to Square-Enix, and Ubisoft is aggressively pursuing plans to get all its major properties onto the Big Screen — the first of these, Assassin’s Creed, arrives later this year.
One has to wonder why game companies continue to partner with Hollywood to make movies if none of them turn out good and not that many of them even turn out profitable. In most modern cases, it’s not about making a good movie or even a successful movie — it’s about strengthening their brand. It’s a game, it’s a movie, it’s a phenomenon! Branding for branding’s sake can easily backfire, though — just ask Mattel, who attempted to make a cheap film out of their action figure Max Steel earlier this year, a move that did nothing but make them a shoo-in for the 2017 Razzies.
In theory, if Sega can make attractive films out of these dormant franchises they own, the names will become more valuable and they can revive the game series they started as. If not, we’ll just have two more bad films to laugh at in regular rotation on TNT.