One of the most celebrated classic beat ‘em up video games of all time, Streets of Rage, is on the verge of being elevated as major motion picture adaptation material. As if that prospect isn’t exciting enough for old-school console connoisseurs, the project is apparently set to be conceived by someone who helped reinvent the action genre, John Wick creator Derek Kolstad. Are we in for a slick, hard-driving big-screen interpretation of the classic side-scroller?
Streets of Rage is getting an adaptation screenplay by Derek Kolstad, according to Deadline. The screenwriter broke out in 2014 upon the arrival of his written work on the franchise-launching John Wick film, a duty he continued to maintain across its two subsequent sequels, although the March-2023-scheduled John Wick: Chapter 4 will manifest without his presence. Yet, his primary accolade is that he rejuvenated the state of action flicks with a franchise that offered a satisfying, viscerally cathartic form of cinematic vengeance through Keanu Reeves’s titular hitman with a heart of gold—notably in the first film in which he viciously hunts down the gangsters who, with whimsical cruelty, made the ultimately fatal mistake of murdering his dog. Thus, Kolstad’s adaptation work on this down-and-dirty criminal-pummeling video game franchise seems to reflect an apt choice to fill in notable substantive story gaps.
The cartridge-based franchise launched as a homegrown offering by SEGA in 1991 with the original Streets of Rage (known as Bare Knuckle in Japan) for the Genesis console. However, it was an arguably inauspicious, seemingly conventional offering, seeing as it arrived under the significantly taller shadow cast from successful, genre-similar and graphically impressive arcade entries from recent years such as Double Dragon, Golden Axe (which was also from SEGA), Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It wasn’t as pretty as those coin-operated contemporaries, and its story about former police officers going the vigilante route with martial arts skills to combat waves of palette-swapped thugs in a fictional city under the siege of criminal corruption and a mastermind derivatively named “Mr. X” was understandably dismissed as generic. Yet, the game still managed to conjure a passionate fanbase, due to its solid gameplay mechanics, multiplayer capabilities and unique character abilities.
1992’s Streets of Rage 2 would up the ante significantly regarding the graphics and mechanics, striking a harmonious balance with more intriguingly unconventional (but no less effective) character choices. To this day, the sequel is widely regarded as one of the best beat ‘em ups ever made. However, momentum plateaued by the time Streets of Rage 3’s 1994 release, and SEGA left the franchise in stasis for some 26 years before picking things up with 2020’s graphically upgraded, nostalgia-tapping Streets of Rage 4 for modern consoles.
Of course, the rub when it comes to video game movies remains their historical hit-or-miss dynamic, which typically falls in favor of the underwhelming latter. However, SEGA—even with the company’s console glory days well in the rearview mirror—has recently emerged as an unlikely breaker of the perceived curse, thanks to the big screen success achieved by the live-action/animated hybrid Sonic the Hedgehog films. Now two films in, Sonic has managed to transcend pandemic-era obstacles to make real money with studio Paramount, with the 2020 first film’s $319.7 million possibly set to be surpassed by the current box office dominance of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which, at press time, has generated $231.1 million worldwide upon its April 8 release.
Pertinent to prospective SEGA synergy, the Streets of Rage movie is gestating with production houses dj2 Entertainment (a producer with a hand in the Sonic films,) and Escape Artists. However, it remains to be seen where the movie project resides on the backlog since Kolstad happens to be attached to another major other-media adaptation of a popular video game franchise, specifically a Netflix-aimed animated series based on Tom-Clancy-based stealth game franchise Splinter Cell, which the streaming giant has already greenlit for an 8-episode inaugural season. Plus, he’s also attached to a Hitman TV series, which would serialize a popular video game series that has already received two film adaptations, in 2007 and 2015, respectively.
Streets of Rage is still in an early stage, with no release window revealed.
