Sega Corporation and Picturestart have announced their collaboration on a cinematic version of the iconic computer game Space Channel 5. The protagonist of Space Channel 5, a music video game set in a future setting reminiscent of the Sixties, fights off bad guys by dancing. The plot of the film adaption reportedly centres on a disgruntled fast-food worker who is recruited by a futuristic reporter assigned to prevent the destruction of Earth by aliens. If we want to defeat the aliens, we’ll have to resort to hip-hop music videos and dance crazes.
Whether or if this movie will be animated is still unknown. It’s a risky move to adapt the game’s core mechanics to what appear to be TikTok’s current tendencies, but it might prove to be a fortuitous one. Barry Battles and Nir Paniry are adapting their novel Space Channel 5 into a screenplay. The Baytown Outlaws, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Eva Longoria, was a 2012 action comedy that Battles both wrote and directed. The science fiction film Extracted (2012), written by Paniry, was shortlisted for the Emerging Visions prize at South by Southwest.
It looks like there isn’t a director lined up for the future film just yet. Sega is also adapting another video game—Comix Zone—into a movie. With the massive success of the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie and its sequel this year, the announcement that Sega is planning future cinematic adaptations of iconic games comes as no surprise at all. In comparison to its over $100 million production budget, Sonic the Hedgehog earned over $319 million worldwide at the box office, while its sequel earned an impressive $402.4 million. A third Sonic the Hedgehog film, also titled Sonic the Hedgehog 3, is set for release in theatres in December 2024.
Sega’s now-defunct Dreamcast was the initial platform for Space Channel 5. North American versions of the game for the PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Advance were released in 2003. In the end, two sequels to Space Channel 5 were published in North America. These were Space Channel 5: Part 2 (2003–2004) and Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash (2020). Part 2 of Space Channel 5 was initially published for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 and then made its way to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. You can now play Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash on PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest, Viveport, and SteamVR. Space Channel 5 will likely be adapted into a film, however, at this time there is little known about the project.