Sega is Trying to Make a Yakuza Movie

There have been a lot of TV and movie projects as of late centered around video games, now that Hollywood seems to have cracked the formula -- or viewers lowered their standards, whatever the case may be. Ubisoft, for example, is trying to make a movie or TV show out of just about every property they own, even the properties they seem keen to forget. Sony's Uncharted movie is currently being filmed. And lest we forget, Nintendo's taking another swing at a Super Mario movie, which is supposed to come out sometime in the next two years.

Sega, perhaps high on the recent-ish success of their Sonic the Hedgehog movie, has decided that they need another one of their iconic franchises up on the silver screen. And if you know anything about Sega, it should be fairly easy to guess which franchise they're hoping to film next: Yakuza.

In a report filed by Variety, Sega is working on this new Yakuza film with 1212 Entertainment (who made that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark remake last year) and Wild Sheep Content (who have presumably done things, but Google isn't being helpful). That said, to say they're "working" on it would be a bit misleading, because according to Variety, they don't even have a script and are currently in the process of trying to find writers to rectify that.

That said, of all the video games to turn into movies, Yakuza makes the most sense. It's basically already just a gangster film with Karaoke mini-games, so I can't imagine that outside it's rather comical sense of humor and a few proper nouns, it'll be all that different from your run-of-the-mill crime drama.

1212 seems to agree with its potential as a franchise, but might be upselling how unique it actually is.

“Yakuza offers us a new playground in which to set compelling stories with complex characters in a unique environment that audiences have rarely seen before. The saga of Kazuma Kiryu has a built-in cinematic appeal – a mix of kinetic action with bursts of comedy, multiple converging storylines, and a gripping journey towards redemption."

Right. Well, if we're still in the script-writing stage, it'll be a long time before this comes out. Maybe long enough that we'll even be able to see it in theaters.