It appears the release of the 2021 Mortal Kombat movie has helped reinvigorate the media space for major fighting game adaptations, and that apparently doesn’t apply to just the big guns of the genre.
Sega is reportedly next in line to bring one of their fighting games to the big screen, but it’s not Virtua Fighter.
Skydance is apparently teaming up with the makers of Sonic the Hedgehog to produce a film for Eternal Champions according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Derek Connolly, a writer for Detective Pikachu, Safety Not Guaranteed, Kong: Skull Island, and the Jurassic World movies, is said to be on board to pen the script of the live-action adaptation.
Toru Nakahara is reportedly producing the movie from the Sega side likely similarly to what he’s done with Sonic while David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger are listed as producers for Skydance — though no director is said to be attached yet.
Eternal Champions initially released all the way back in 1993 on the Sega Genesis as one of the first major fighting games built from the ground up for home consoles following the arcade craze of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat crossing over into their space with great success.
This allowed Sega to put more emphasis on other aspects like story, which was largely relegated to large chunks of text to read through, but the premise admittedly does sound interesting for a film (and has assuredly been done before).
Basically, the being known as the Eternal Champion brings together warriors from across time as far back as 50,000 B.C. with Slash to 2345 A.D. with R.A.X. the cyber-kickboxer.
These fighters were all killed before their destined time, so now they have a second chance to change that and become a new champion who will bring balance back to the doomed world.
Eternal Champions was pretty well received upon release with its in-depth mechanics and story for the time (plus violent stage finishers), and it performed well enough to get a sequel on the Sega CD called Challenge from the Dark Side alongside a couple of spin-offs in the ’90s.
While a third game was in the works for the Sega Saturn along with apparent talks of comic book and cartoon adaptations, Sega of the Japan essentially pulled the plug on the budding franchise so that they could put their focus on pushing Virtua Fighter for the western market instead.
Sega would go on to basically ignore Eternal Champions for the next two decades except to include the first game on the Sega Genesis Mini in 2019.
Capcom is of course also on board with producing a new Street Fighter live-action film as well though that project has run into some problems having lost its directors earlier this Summer.
They still gave it a release date in 2026, however, for while Mortal Kombat 2 is slated to hit theaters in October 2025.
Considering a script isn’t even reportedly done yet, Eternal Champions is likely still a multitude of years away from releasing if it does truly get off the ground.
If it were to perform well enough, maybe Sega would finally look into bringing the series back with a new fighting game after the rumored Virtua Fighter project is done.