Sega’s Shinobi is finally coming back, but perhaps not in the way that gamers expected.
As reported by Deadline, Sega signed a deal to make a Shinobi movie. Sega is producing the project alongside Marc Platt Productions and Story Kitchen.
Now, none of these names may sound familiar, but Sega is actually working with people they know. Mike Goldberg, for example, has been representing Sega’s IP for Hollywood for some time now. Dmitri Johnson produced the Sonic movies, and he is producing for this film as well.
So this may all seem unexpected, but it’s actually a safe step forward for Sega to bring their franchises to other mass media. They may feel confident in bringing forward a relative unknown property like Shinobi, because of the current wave of video game adaptations. That includes their own Sonic the Hedgehog movies and the somewhat perplexing Knuckles spinoff TV show.
But arguably, Shinobi has better prospects of success in the movies than Sonic. Joe Musashi is steeped in the tropes of the ninja boom of the 1980s and 1990s. That boom launched in 1981 thanks to Cannon Films’ Enter The Ninja, and brought the ninjas to comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, toy aisles, and of course, video games.
This first Shinobi was designed as Sega’s answer to the side scrolling action of Namco’s Rolling Thunder. However, the franchise would be best known for the Shinobi games released to the Sega Genesis. Those games cast you as Joe Musashi, a member of the Oboro clan who fights the evil crime syndicate Neo Zeed.
The Shinobi games depicted Joe and other Oboro clan members as ninjas with superhuman abilities, and who can also wield seemingly magical ninja abilities. This isn’t that much different from ninjas in the movies. While the ninja craze has long gone, they have also long been established as pop culture archetypes around the world.
Directing this upcoming Shinobi movie is action choreographer and director Sam Hargrave, who most recently directed Extraction 2. The script is being penned by Ken Kobayashi, a USC graduate who gained attention for his 2019 award winning screenplay Move On. Ken has most recently written an episode of Apple TV series Sunny, and he has the chops to make a dramatic narrative that’s more than just background for Joe’s action scene exploits.
So there’s real potential here for Sega to make a real winner of a movie. But questions would arise to how closely this film will hew to the video game franchise it is based on, and also how it will inform Sega’s future moves with the Shinobi franchise, and future potential adaptations.
