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Sega & Skydance team up for an Eternal Champions movie

Jurassic World writer Derek Connolly has been tapped to write a live-action script for Sega's bizarre 1993 fighting game.

TJ Denzer

August 19, 2024 10:03 AM

Image via Sega

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A very unlikely Sega fighting game is coming back from the 1990s to hit the silver screen in the future. Sega and Skydance have officially announced a collaboration for a film based on the 1993 Sega Mega Drive and Genesis title, Eternal Champions. A wealth of talent has been confirmed on both sides, including script writer Derek Connolly, who penned the script for Jurassic World.

The collaboration between Sega and Skydance was confirmed via the Hollywood Reporter, which shared details on the talent going into the game. Alongside Connolly, Skydance is putting up David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger as producers on the project. Meanwhile, Toru Nakahara, who has been involved heavily in the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movies, will be producing for Sega.

Eternal Champions is quite an oddball pick for a revival, let alone a film. The game was essentially Sega’s answer to Mortal Kombat, featuring a story in which the Earth is in a terrible state due to too many pivotal failures throughout history involving key figures. The phantasmal Eternal Champion oversees the Earth and time and, seeing how bad things have gotten, gathers these key figures from throughout history. He only has the energy to resurrect one of them, but any one would be pivotal in the Earth’s survival, so they engage in a tournament to see who will live.

This was the game where you could have a half-human, half-robot kickboxer facing off against a brutal caveman, or a 1920s Chicago private investigator fighting a merman from the sunken city of Atlantis. It wasn’t good enough to chip Mortal Kombat’s success, but it was still a quirky game that has stayed with a lot of fans who played it back in the day.

Given there hasn’t been much in the way of new content for Eternal Champions since around 1995 when its Sega CD sequel came out, it will be interesting to see what Sega and Skydance come up with for the film. Stay tuned for more details here at Shacknews as they drop.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.