SEGA Planning A 'Shinobi' Movie To Bring Ninja Action To The Big Screen

Back in December of 2014, the video game company SEGA formed a new company called Stories International that would begin developing some of their popular game titles to adaptations into movies and TV shows. At the time, the titles thrown around for potential adaptation included Altered Beast, Streets of Rage, Rise of Nightmares, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter, Golden Axe and Shinobi. Now the latter ninja video game seems to be the first project to move forward with development.

Variety reports Bridge of Spies producer Marc Platt is parterning with Stories International to develop and produce a film adaptation of the video game Shinobi. The side-scrolling game debuted in arcades in 1987 and eventually had several versions make it to home video game systems such as SEGA's Master System, the Nintendo Entertainment System and more.

The original Shinobi allowed players to control a modern-day ninja named Joe Musashi who must taken down a criminal organization called Zeed after they kidnap his students. The action is spread out over five missions that takes Musashi to Zeed's headquarters to free all the hostages by taking down various henchman and eventually enemy bosses. It's your standard side-scrolling action game.

It's easy to see how the story could be adapted to the big screen, even if it's a bit derivative of plenty of action movies. But this one would stand out a bit since we don't get a lot of ninja-based action films nowadays. Here's what Marc Platt had to say about the Shinobi movie:

"We love the Shinobi games and believe that the world of ninjas has never been properly explored onscreen. We now have the opportunity to do just that. With Shinobi, we hope to make a film that honors the essence of the games and brings this fascinating world to life for moviegoing audiences."

At the very least, this sounds like the most promising SEGA title out of the aforementioned batch to turn into a film. Hopefully the film won't whitewash the lead role, something Hollywood has been prone to doing lately. Our own Angie Han recently wrote about why this is so frustrating if you're not up on the film industry's casting habits. Surely SEGA, a Japanese company, won't let that happen with Shinobi, right?

We'll see just how many of SEGA's video game titles actually make it to the big screen, or even the small screen. Are there any other SEGA titles you'd like to see adapted for film and television?