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Live-Action Pac-Man Movie In the Works (hollywoodreporter.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
A live-action film based on PAC-MAN is in the works from Bandai Namco Entertainment -- the company behind PAC-MAN -- and Wayfarer Studios, the production company founded by Justin Baldoni and Steve Sarowitz. The Hollywood Reporter reports: First introduced in the U.S. in 1980 -- and originally called Puck Man in Japan -- PAC-MAN became a coin-operated staple. The game is set in mazes where Pac-Man has to eat pellets while being pursued by colorful ghosts as the mazes get progressively more difficult. The game begat merchandise, several sequel games like Ms. PAC-MAN, as well as two television series, including a Hanna-Barbera produced ABC series and a Disney XD take.

The project will be based on an original idea from Chuck Williams (Sonic the Hedgehog) of Lightbeam Entertainment. Baldoni, Manu Gargi and Andrew Calof will produce on behalf of Wayfarer Studios, with Tracy Ryerson developing; Williams and Tim Kwok will produce on behalf of Lightbeam.
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Live-Action Pac-Man Movie In the Works More

Live-Action Pac-Man Movie In the Works

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  • ... and I get a First Post.

    Sad it had to be this article though.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by arctor ( 411306 )

      Congratulations! And...wow, 27417, you must be old.

      Pac-man? I can honestly say I've never played it. Every arcade box I can remember was always Ms. Pac-Man.

      • Ms. Pac-Man was a hardware mod created by MIT dropouts because they thought Pac-Man was too easy!

        There have been a few really interesting [fastcompany.com] articles [gameinformer.com] documenting the history of how Ms. Pac-Man came to be.

  • Was Sonic not bad enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @06:38AM (#62774220)
    Seriously, how much coke was done to think this was a good idea?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A live-action Ms Pac-Man done as lesbian porn.

      Otherwise, meh.

    • Re: Was Sonic not bad enough? (Score:4)

      by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @07:21AM (#62774276)

      And considering the box failure that Super Mario Bros movie was..

      The best adaptation of pacman was 10 seconds in an episode of Futurama. It can't be good if it lasts more than that.

    • At least sonic had some basis of a backstory when sega created it. Something you could build a script out of. PAC-MAN has nothing. You might as well make a story about a record holding hotdog eater.

      • Do keep in mind that Namco has tried many, many times to give Pac-Man a plot. Many times. Their previous attempts have not been smashing successes.

        • Re: Was Sonic not bad enough? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @08:14AM (#62774338)
          Its because even the game lacked any mechanics. Every level more or less the same as the previous levels. Take Battleship. It took one hell of a plot spin to rope in Aliens and sonar buoys to get back to the game mechanics the movie title was meant to capture. Some games are just too simplistic. As a farce, Futurama did do a decent small bit segment of Space Invaders meant purely in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. The older the game, the less content. Want to make a movie about the game Asteroids? Anything less than The Empire Strikes Back, where the Millennium Falcon is being chased through an asteroid field, is going to come up short for that movie title. IMO the best video game adaptions come from the single player PC games that had storyline. Tomb Raider was not a terrible idea for a movie script because the game itself had story. As bad as the gameplay was, those adventure based games where you solved clues to advance through the story, like those Tex Murphey ones, at least give you a basic plot to expand a story on. Sometimes the plot and story are more substantive than the gameplay actually was. When it comes to a movie adaptation, I would rather start with a silly game that had an amazing plot, than a story-less quick reaction tweaker game.

          • Re: Was Sonic not bad enough? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @09:01AM (#62774418) Homepage Journal

            They already managed to turn it into multiple cartoon shows and several sequel games.

            The game itself actually has some depth, but it's very Japanese. You can beat the game simply by learning patterns and repeating them. I say simply, of course at the time discovering those patterns was a real challenge, and even now it's not easy to remember and repeat them all perfectly. The ghost AI is deterministic but also very well designed to produce an exciting game. Even the limitations of the hardware are put to good use - collision detection is done based on occupancy of 8x8 blocks, so ghosts can get extremely close, overlapping Pac-man's sprite, and the player can still get away.

            Most modern games are more about reacting and playing through a story. Pac-man is like the distilled essence of what traditional Japanese gaming is all about. But somehow I doubt that will come up in the movie.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

              Most modern games are more about reacting and playing through a story. Pac-man is like the distilled essence of what traditional Japanese gaming is all about. But somehow I doubt that will come up in the movie.

              Unless the movie title is "Pac-man and the missing plot"

            • All of the Pac-Man cartoons have been awful. Most of the "world building" done by the non-maze games has been undone multiple times as they continue to swap in and out characters.

              There's no good associated material for them to use.

          • Man, they fuck up with Battleship so hard.
            That was a WWII movie with cool boats shooting explosion at each other.

          • You would probably enjoy reading You, by Austin Grossman [worldcat.org].
            There's a lot of (fictional) exploration of the ways video games and movies do and don't intersect.

      • Well, with a little bit of imagination you could make a Guy Ritchie style film about a guy that tried to escape four goons that can geolocate him. He has a jar of pills that he can eat to keep awake, and one in thirty pills will give him berserk energy and strength.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

          He has a jar of pills that he can eat to keep awake, and one in thirty pills will give him berserk energy and strength.

          They could team up with meth dealers for cross promotion...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 )
          Not sure there is enough beer in my movie theater to drag me to see that film ;-) I'd probably wait till it was on Paramount+ before I let my kid see it.

        • Well, with a little bit of imagination you could make a Guy Ritchie style film about a guy that tried to escape four goons that can geolocate him. He has a jar of pills that he can eat to keep awake, and one in thirty pills will give him berserk energy and strength.

          You could set it in a German techno club and call it: "Run, Pac-Man Run".

    • Sonic and Sonic 2 have done well at the box office. Though why anyone thinks that Pac-Man will translate just as well to a movie is anyone's guess. At least Sonic sort of has a plot.

      • I hear you on the skepticism. For better or worse, I don't think box office success requires that the source material have a plot. The 'better' means that the writers have great lattitude to create their own narrative from scratch and gently hook it to the source. The 'worse' is when the adapted film skimps on story budget and has to emphasize on the license costs. This has been the typical arrangement historically.

        Frequently, more and more modern franchise owners are looking to films less as a quic
        • Yes it does not have to be an intricate plot worthy of Shakespeare to be successful. See John Wick: Someone steals his car and kills his dog; he revenge murders people in fantastic ways.

    • Those with money to spend, Early Menials and Gen X were the ages of 10-25 while Pac-man was popular. Thing you were exposed to at that age, where you were old enough to be able to do most things, and have a general grasp on what is going on in the world, but not yet bogged down by pressures and stresses of real life. We see these things as part of a better simpler time. Sure in real life, there was a lot of serious crap going on, a Cold War, Massive changes in Race and Gender expectations, and in general

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I think your calendar is a bit off. Pac-man was released in 1980, and was at its most popular in the first few years afterwards. So Gen X, the youngest of whom would have been born in 1980, would have been between 0 and 17 for that. Younger boomers would have been playing it too.

        By the time millennials were old enough to play it seriously, it would have been old hat. By the late 80s the 16 bit machines were coming in.

        • Eh, I was still playing Pac-Man on an Atari 400 until we got a PC in 1992. Most people weren't rich enough to have the latest and greatest computers back then, my family was middle class.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dddux ( 3656447 )

      Oh just a baggie. Potato one.

    • It's bound to be better than https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

    • Which Sonic are you talking about? The financial success which was the first one making back 4x its budget at the box office, or Sonic 2 which made just slightly more than 4x its budget at the box office?

  • I've always thought the plot was tailor made (Score:4, Funny)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @07:05AM (#62774258)
    for a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza. It has everything moviegoers love - pellets, walls, ghosts... It's a no-brainer!

  • The porn version will take the internet by storm: a live version of Ms Pac-man. She will still be gobbling white spots, but it will be...different. No doubt the names of the ghosts will have to be adapted.

  • It actually has potential... (Score:5, Funny)

    by excelsior_gr ( 969383 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @07:57AM (#62774318)
    It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story [smbc-comics.com]

  • This is going to be a movie about boxing.

  • Right next to the Batgirl movie, and near Superman Lives and Spider man 4.
    There must be a lot of money out there right now seeking a home, because it's amazing this one ever got past the "Oh, here's an idea" stage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      I'm upset it even reached the "here's an idea" stage. Modern Hollywood producers are a bunch of mouth breathers.

      • It is kinda part of the cycle.

        Find a new formula, that gets people interested. Expand on it, let it grow, milk it for all its got, try and fail for some new formulas until a new one caches on.

        We are at the milk it for all its got phase right now.

        Marvel movies post End-Game no longer seem as epic, and are becoming predictable.
        DC is still trying to figure out what Marvel did right and what they did wrong
        Harry Potter Fantastic Beast, seem to take a lot of the wonder and mystery of a magical world.
        Lets take a C

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          20th century Hollywood didnt need a couple of decades between original productions. As for the "odd and scary" part, outside of not being interested in movies or shows blatantly targeted to teens anymore that doesnt seem to be the problem I'm having with movies and certainly seems like it hasnt been a problem for me in finding shows.

  • It's animation instead of live action, but stories based on 8-bit computer games don't get better than his Animation vs. Arcade Games [youtube.com].

    The rest of his work is pretty epic too.

  • like a psychotic pill-popping Pac Man who goes around frantically looking for some more shiny dots and power pills, while a group of ghosts in a post-apocalyptic world contemplate how they can stop him from doing more damage. The ghosts are the main protagonists, each with their own personality. They make repeated attempts to break out of the jail and once and for all stop the carnage.

  • Running time 256 min!

  • Pac Man was originally called Puc Man [youtube.com] and they changed it because . . . not becase Pac Man looks like a hockey puck, paku paku means flap your mouth, and they were worried people would scratch out the P and turn it into an F like . . .

  • (insert: "But why?" meme [imgur.com])

  • You guys talking about Ms.Pac-Man... she doesn't exist anymore in Bandai Namco's eyes. They release the latest Pac-Man Museum game a few months ago, and Ms.Pac-Man was oddly not amongst the games. They still featured a female Pac character in the museum, but they called her "Pac-Mom" instead, with a slightly different look than Ms.Pac-Man. Apparently Bandai Namco doesn't own the rights to Ms.Pac-Man and they don't want to license her anymore.

    .

    Also, I hope this new Pac movie is a lot better than Pixels.

  • ...will this be based upon the tv show, or upon the legend that the game is really about the Donner Party?
  • â¦And the inevitable, Solitaire:The Movie - The Snyder Cut

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