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Bolstered by its success in bringing the world of Sonic to the big screen, Sega is making good on its plans to bring its long history of gaming franchises to the big screen with the announcement of another classic getting a live-action rework: Shinobi. But are we going to get a grounded ninja-action movie, or are we going to get Shinobi at its most delightfully weird?
Deadline reports that Sega has teamed up with Universal to bring Shinobi to the big screen, tapping Extraction director Sam Hargrave to lead the film, with a script from Sunny‘s Ken Kobayashi. A side-scrolling action series that began life in the arcades in 1987, following the escapades of Joe Musashi, the scion of the Oboro clan of ninjas, and his battles against a rival ninja crime syndicate Zeed and its multiple successors as they attempt to return contemporary Japan to the Sengoku period, and a time where the ninja were ascendant. The franchise has gone on to spawn over a dozen games in the last four decades, including a new one announced at last year’s Game Awards.
All that sounds like the makings of a decent action movie. I mean, those Extraction movies were pretty great, and you’ve got a winning combination in ninjas, crime syndicates, and the amalgamation of both in ninja crime. But I want something more than just a ninja movie that has the Shinobi name on it. I want the unhinged and joyous copyright infringement of Revenge of Shinobi made manifest on the big screen. The third entry in the series, and a Genesis classic, Revenge of Shinobi had some completely out there cameos of random cultural icons in its initial versions. Enemies based on Rambo, the Terminator, and Jackie Chan all appeared in the game, and in one level, players face off against a giant kaiju that looks exactly like Godzilla.
But the best ‘homage’ comes in Revenge‘s sixth level, which climaxes with Joe facing off against a villain named Metamorpher… who decides to just straight up shapeshift into Spider-Man, climbing the ceilings, and thwipping webs at you. After enough damage, Spider-Man suddenly transforms into Batman of all people, flying around the arena encircled by bats. It’s wild, and made wilder by the fact that at the time, Sega had no actual licenses for these characters.
Later versions of Shinobi had to be changed to tweak many of these rather obvious cameos–but at least the Spider-Man one stuck around in these various versions, as a couple of years later, Sega actually had a licensing agreement with Marvel in place to create the 1991 game Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin. The Batman portion of the fight saw Spidey peace out and be replaced by a random winged monster, instead. Given the limited nature of the agreement however, Revenge of Shinobi was blocked from re-release for years thanks to the fight, but eventually versions released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console, as well as the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network in 2009 and 2012, respectively, were cleared by simply updating the Spider-Man sprite to a bright pink palette swap.
The odds of Tom Holland shapeshifting into Robert Pattinson to try and beat up a ninja on the big screen are, admittedly, pretty slim, given that the Shinobi movie is being developed at Universal, rather than somewhere more license-convenient like Sony Pictures or Disney. But given we live in this age of franchise crossovers and the establishment of franchise meta-universes, a Shinobi movie without at least some kind of flagrant copyright skirting feels wrong to me. Stranger things have happened, of course–remember when it felt like we’d never see Spider-Man in an MCU movie? Would the pink costume swap be enough for a multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster? We have a while to ponder, at least.
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