Sega announced that OutRun is getting a movie adaptation by Universal Pictures, with Michael Bay directing.
Bay and Brad Fuller are also producers through “Platinum Dunes’ first-look deal with Universal Pictures.”
Jayson Rothwell will be writing the screenplay for the OutRun movie, and Sydney Sweeney will serve as a producer.
On Sega’s side, Toru Nakahara will serve as a producer with Shuji Utsumi (President and COO of Sega Corporation) overseeing the project.
Universal Pictures have previously adapted two big video games into box office hits. The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed over 1.4 billion USD whereas Five Nights at Freddy’s had 290 million USD, and is expecting OutRun to perform just as well.
This is the most recent news about OutRun for a long while. Originally an arcade game released in the 1980s, the series about a guy and a girl driving really fast across the road and making turns that changes the route of a playthrough was last seen as a video game release back in 2006 with OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast, as a PS2/Xbox game (which then got ported to Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2009).
As a racing game, OutRun doesn’t really have much of a story. So as long as this film adaptation can get a Ferrari of some kind (preferably the Testarossa, which has the same proportions to the fictional car as seen in the arcade games, and as featured in Coast 2 Coast), some cinematic shots of driving on highways and coastal roads, and some music from the series, that should be enough to make it feel faithful to the IP. It can do whatever to fill in the gaps.
Adaptation of video game IPs into other media like films and TV series have been happening on the regular in the past few years. Sega themselves scored a hit film franchise with Sonic The Hedgehog, to the point that Sonic games now have DLC tie-ins to the movie.
Maybe one day OutRun can have another new video game, but at least the series isn’t dormant anymore, unless the production of the film hit a snag, which usually happens.