Sega has officially announced that it has reached an agreement with North American media company Picture Start for the production of 'Space Channel 5' and 'Comix Zone' films. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news shortly after, shining more light on the details of the collaborative project.
Released in 1999 as a title for the Sega Dreamcast, Space Channel 5 is a music game set in a future space broadcasting station. Players take the role of Ulala, a reporter working for a news channel in a 1960s-styled sci-fi future filled with competing news channels. She later moves on to fighting aliens with not just her reporting but also dance powers and music. With the help of her fans, Ulala will defeat the aliens and their leader Blank. It gained popularity due to its disco-like music and cutting-edge graphics at the time, and the movie will aim to have a similar premise.
The new project by Sega is currently being written by Barry Battles and Nir Paniry. Battles is a writer and director known for his work on the Baytown Outlaws, and Far Cry 5: Inside Eden's Gate. He won the 2007 Southern Fried Flicks Film Festival Award for best short film and audience choice. Paniry is known for Extracted, an independent 2012 American sci-fi thriller about a scientist whose consciousness gets trapped in the mind of a convict, and was nominated for the Emerging Visions Audience Award at the SXSW film festival.
Comix Zone is an action beat'em up game for the Sega Megadrive released in 1995. It has impressive cartoon-like graphics in the style of an American comic book. It was a revolutionary game that got Sega the patent for a "videogame system for creating a simulated comic book game". The work tells the story of a popular artist who wanders into the world of comics, and moves from frame to frame to fight scary monsters. The game is also now available on the Genesis Mini, released by Sega in 2019.
Comix Zone will be written by Mae Catt, who is best known for Transformers: Cyberverse, Marvel Rising, and Young Justice. Picture Start will oversee the two projects, which is a company responsible for many Academy Award-winning films and adaptions including The Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games. At SEGA, Shuji Utusmi, executive vice president, and Toru Nakahara, producer of 'Sonic: The Movie' Series will be overseeing the work. The writer for the original Space Channel game Takumi Yoshinaga will also be participating in the project, along with Sega producer Kagasei Shimomura.
Sega is currently working on a third movie in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie series, which was announced by Sonic's voice actor Ben Schwartz on Twitter to be releasing in Theaters in December 2024. Picture Start is also co-producing a Borderlands movie, based on the video game series of the same name developed by Gearbox. A first look at the movie was revealed earlier this year.