Those live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movies were decently fun (and we’re obviously dying to see Shadow shoot people in the third one), but they did, unfortunately, convince Hollywood that there is some money to be made with big-screen adaptations of classic video games—we have no objections to Ben Schwartz, but we can’t help but point out that Chris Pratt’s Super Mario wouldn’t be happening if not for him and his Sonic voice. The latest video game to get picked up by Hollywood is Pac-Man, with a story from The Hollywood Reporter saying that publisher Bandai Namco is working with production company Wayfarer Studios on some kind of live-action adaptation of the old arcade game.
We don’t know anything about plot or whether or not a human actor will be wearing a big yellow suit, but the movie is apparently based on “an original idea” from Chuck Williams, a longtime Disney employee who was recently a producer on the first Sonic movie. But, of course, there are decades of complex Pac-Man lore for this movie to build off of.
Will this be based on the original game, where he’s just a yellow circle who eats pellets that give him the power to eat ghosts, temporarily sending them to prison? Will it tie in with Ms. Pac-Man, the sequel game that is famously better in every way and features a more interesting protagonist who doesn’t deserve to be overshadowed by some man? Will it adapt the pre-Crisis Pac-Man comics where he was a member of the Justice Society Of America? We made that up, but we’d see that movie!
There have been Pac-Man cartoon shows in the past, so this really isn’t completely absurd or unheard of, and sticklers might even point out that Pac-Man has been involved in a few live-action movies already. There was Pixels, where Pac-Man is a big monster (Josh Gad has sex with Q*Bert!), but also Joel Potrykus’ Relaxer, where a man attempts to complete an impossible Pac-Man challenge.
It probably won’t be anything like that one… but the beauty of these movies based on things with no story or characters is that they have the freedom to be anything. (That being said, we’re betting it will be about ghosts chasing Pac-Man out of the Pac-World and into our universe, where he befriends a human person, and the two of them go on a Sonic-style adventure. Ms. Pac-Man appears in a post-credits scene.)