While others started with Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Tekken, my childhood fighting game obsession was 1993’s Eternal Champions. That series didn’t quite have the same longevity, as it turned out, but today I am vindicated: They’re making an Eternal Champions movie.
I’d forgive you if you’ve never heard of this particular Sega Megadrive (or Genesis) classic—to catch you up, it was basically a fighting game where characters from all throughout time came together to beat the stuffing out of each other. You could play a caveman against a 1920s mobster, or a bounty hunter from the future against a ninja from the ’90s. It was very much aping Mortal Kombat, outside of that twist—it had its own equivalent of fatalities, for example—but its weird roster and fun backdrops (each stage a different time period, naturally) gave it plenty of personality.
As spotted by The Hollywood Reporter, Derek Connolly has been invited to write a script for a film based on the game, to be produced by Skydance Media in collaboration with Sega. The pedigree here is a little mixed—Connolly co-wrote Kong: Skull Island, which I thought was very good fun, but also the Jurassic World movies, and he wrote one of the early versions of the pretty disastrous Rise of Skywalker. Skydance itself has worked on everything from Top Gun: Maverick and Annihilation to The Tomorrow War and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. So my professional opinion is that this movie might be good, or alternatively it might be bad.
It’s certainly a pretty random property to resurrect at this point—the original game got a sequel in 1995, but apart from that I don’t think there’s been a peep from the series in nearly 30 years. You have to question how much brand recognition is left there, and I don’t even know that there’s much nostalgia out there for it, even if it still has a place in my heart.
But it does have a pretty fun and unique premise, which counts for a lot. The reason all those characters throughout time are together is because they’ve all been plucked from the moment just before their deaths by a god called the Eternal Champion. This being gives them the chance to battle for a second chance at life, an opportunity to achieve their potential greatness and change the course of history.
It’s a set-up that fits right in with the modern movie studio obsession with superhero multiverses. You’ve got unlikely characters from wildly different worlds thrown together, each with their own weird quirks that are basically superpowers—you’ve got a magic-wielding alchemist from the 1600s, a cyborg kickboxer, a ninja assassin… I could go on. And I will—there’s an Atlantean gladiator, a Russian acrobat, a mutant vampire…
Of course, projects like this go into production all the time and never actually emerge, so it’s very possible this won’t come to anything. Even if it does, videogame movies are still not in a great place overall, outside of Mario and Sonic. But I’m choosing to be cautiously optimistic about this one. Don’t I deserve a movie catered exclusively to my specific childhood interests just like everyone else? And if you’re curious to check the original game out for yourself, it’s available on Steam for less than £1.