If you’ve got an intellectual property, Jeff Bezos wants to make a film out of it. Next up on Amazon’s docket of movies to make is ToeJam & Earl, Sega’s 1990s hip-hop-themed roguelike that was most recently resurrected in 2019’s ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove (opens in new tab).
Spotted by The Hollywood Reporter (opens in new tab), the film is being worked on by Amazon Studios in collaboration with NBA superstar Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media and Story Kitchen, a media company helmed by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad and Sonic the Hedgehog producer Dmitri Johnson. What a potent admixture.
Personally, I’m hoping the resulting feature somehow unites these disparate threads into a slickly-choreographed rap-focused action flick with basketball elements and also Sonic the Hedgehog is there. Sadly it’ll probably just be, like, a normal movie.
The screenplay is being written by Nunzio Randazzo and Amos Vernon, both of whom recently worked on Hotel Transylvania: Transformania. It’ll centre on ToeJam and Earl’s quest to find a cure for a disease that’s devastating their home planet’s funk levels. That mission brings them to Earth, the place where “the music that created their culture originated”.
It’s far from Amazon’s only gaming-related movie project right now, but it might be the most left-field choice the company has made so far. Amazon is also working on films or TV shows based around Blade Runner, Fallout, Mass Effect, Disco Elysium and Life Is Strange. A film derived from a ’90s roguelike about rapping aliens collecting spaceship parts is a bit of an odd duck among that collection, but not an unwelcome one.
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