While plot details from Capcom and Chernin Entertainment's live action Mega Man movie remain under tight wraps, screenwriter Mattson Tomlin (The Batman, Project Power) shared a little about what he hopes to achieve with the film's portayal of the Blue Bomber himself.
Via Polygon:
Polygon: How did you approach making Mega Man functional as a movie character?Tomlin: I think the same way with with any other character, you treat him like he’s a real person. I was brought into that later in the process because Henry [Joost] and Ariel [Schulman], who directed Project Power, are also directing the Mega Man movie, and they had been working on it for a while and we just had such a good time working on Project Power together that they decided to be kind enough to continue to party in this other universe. My way into it was always, what is a compelling story? And what is the real soul of that character? We all kind of know him as this cartoonish Blue Bomber who jumps and shoots, and to kind of go beyond that and knowing that, OK, visually it’s going to be a certain thing that is going to please the video game fan, but you know what is the story at the center? They’re like, what is it that this character can really go through? It’ll be universal and primal and emotional and everybody can kind of relate to. So I’m really excited about that script. I’m really excited about what the guys are going to do with that movie and and hopefully there’ll be some news about it soon.
More from this interview at Polygon.
The live action Mega Man movie will be directed by Henry Joost and Rel Schulman and produced by Masi Oka. The movie does not have a cast or release date at this time. More news soon!
Sounds like a 2deep4me Mega Man movie. It'd work better for Proto Man.
ReplyDeleteEither that or make an Mega Man X movie. Although it's a sequel series, it wouldn't take much work to write it into a standalone film and it already ties to go for the same vibe this guy is talking about.
DeleteSome Megaman manga adaptations do have deep plots (i.e. Hitoshi Ariga's SkullMan arc and Shigeto Ikehara's CentaurWoman), but I seriously doubt the current movie industries can handle something like these.
DeleteThough to be fair, Japan sucks at live-action adaptation as much as Hollywood.
Yeah MMX or maybe Zero would work better for this, too.
DeleteI forgot about Ariga's work. It's not something I follow, and unfortunately I doubt the people who work on this even know who Ariga is.
Japan has a better track record for live adaptions than the US.
DeleteI don't watch live adaptions, but I hear the Kenshin, Parasyte and a few others were pretty good. I do wanna see the Kenshin one, at some point.
At least Japan sticks to the source material, and doesn't RADICALLY deviate. Which is what I expect will happen here.
CentaurWoman? Oh wow. I did not know that happened. What's the story behind that?
DeleteIn Shigeto Ikehara's story, CentaurMan was actually CentaurWoman, who was the lover of KnightMan. They both fought MegaMan followinging to Mr.X/Wily's order and wanted to have a peaceful life after the mission is done. After KnightMan got defeated and destroyed by MegaMan, CentaurWoman went mad and decided to avenge her lover. While fighting CentaurWoman, MegaMan learned about her identity and relationship with KnightMan, but have no choice but defeat her in order to protect others. After the fight, MegaMan looked back at CentaurWoman's corpse and cried, but still have no choice but moving forward to fight the next Robot Master.
DeleteKenshin and Parasyte got lucky, but most Japanese live action adaptions are nothing but disaster. Poor CGI and cringy acting, not to mention those adaptions are mostly marketing toward actor/actress fans instead of original fanbase and thus give zero damn about the story. Look at the live action of Attack of Titans and you'll know how awful it can be.
Those few successful screenplay adaptions are mostly RomComs, and if you wanted a good Japanese live action that respect its source material, go look for the Musical/Stage Play adaptions, those are the one that truly marketing toward original fans.
y e s
ReplyDeleteI have No Hope for this movie and even fear it. Ya gotta remember,even thevX and Zero series were aimed toward a General Audience and weren't dark and gritty. At most they were Light PG-13. Anyway,hope there won't be a sequel or a TV series.
ReplyDeleteNow,if they adapted Fully Charged or did their Own thing instead of adapting an existing Capcom Mega Man series,then No Harm,No Foul. Keep the movies and pofential TV show General Audience (PG-13 or Under) and tbey will have a greater chance of success. Mega Man wasn't ment to be R-Rated,not even the X and Zero series.
Me either. I don't trust the film industry. I've seen them do WAY too much damage lately. I don't want them anywhere near Mega Man.
DeleteHaven't that thing about making the movie R-rated been scrapped long-ago? And even if i haven't, i'm pretty sure they're not even thinking avout it anymore.
DeleteAgreed. Hollywood ruins everything. :(
Delete"Primal and Emotional story"
ReplyDeleteDont worry,he dont need to do anything anyway as this movie existence is already a primal and emotional to all of us...
I LOVE Mega Man!!! I grew up with the games and have been a hardcore blue bomber fanatic my whole life. When it comes to the animated series ill be honest and say its not the greatest cartoon ever. I found it to be better when i was younger but I still enjoy it now that Im older. It can be a bit cheesy and corny at times but if your a Mega man fan then you'll love it too! A good dvd set containing all of season 1. .....I'd say its a must have for any real Mega Man fan and collector!
ReplyDeleteBut can they make it as primal and emotional as The Mega's music? Those guys made me FEEL for the robots.
ReplyDeleteI personally think The Megas are super cheesy, but your comment made me think that the original music from the games is an important emotional component, and I hope they listen to it while writing/designing, etc.
DeleteOh man I love The Megas! And their forays into Castlevania music have been great.
DeleteCliched adjectives, which don't even sound like Mega Man, like "primal" & "emotional," don't reassure me that this movie won't join the unholy ranks of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, the King of Fighters movie, or any Uwe Boll catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteI expect "visceral" to be said, eventually; he forgot that one...
From what little we know, it seems clear that it will not be anywhere close to Uwe Boll level of bad. Double Dragon or Street fighter, however? Maybe. Only the future will tell.
DeleteAnd some have proved among the year that you could make emotional goes with Mega Man.
Primal and emotional could be used to describe many kid-friendly movie, even.
Really, as long as they don't throw-in "egdy", "grounded", "mature", or any other "needlessly dark movie that takes itself way too seriously" words there's still hope. No guarantee that it will be good, still many chances that it will be bad. but hope.
When I think of Primal and Emotional kids films, I think of stuff like Don Bluth's earlier films, E.T, Iron Giant, Studio Ghibli, Neverending Story and Watership Downs and Rankin Bass' book films. Now they had serious talent!
DeleteAnd there we have it - confirmation that it's DEFINITELY going to be terrible. Primal and emotional... Something for the kids but not squarely in the kid territory...
ReplyDeleteSo it's basically going to be the Super Mario Bros. movie but with Mega Man?
I don't think anyone has ever used those words to describe the SMB movie.
DeleteThe super-Mario bross movie was'nt going for emotional at all. And primal can mean absolutely anything nowadays.
DeleteDon't know if this will be bad or good, but nothing indicate that it's heading Mario bross teritory.
If anything, worse case scenario it will be like the Street Fighter movie. Bad, but in a funny way.
"Confirmation that it's definitely going to be terrible" is a overeaction when we don't even know anything about the movie.
You could describes dozens of kid or family friendly movie with "primal" and "emotional" (a good half of them animated, but that's another question).
DeleteReally if anything, the problem is that theses words does'nt means much on their own, so we're still as much in the dark as ever regarding this movie.
@Anon 8:56
DeleteI sorta thought the same thing. It seemed like a bunch of vague important speech.
Like Shakespeare said:
"...a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
So many ungrateful people. Did you not remember the drought from 2012-2018? Did you complain when Mega Man Zero was announced and they changed the protagonist from a Mega Man to Zero? I plan on watching this even if it's bad.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, I must have missed the part where I am supposed to be grateful for works I never asked for and/or actively don't want from an industry I despise, one in which I am 99.9% certain will damage the brand.
DeleteIf nobody asked for it, what is there to be thankful for?
DeleteThey didn't change the main character from Mega Man to Zero they changed the main character from X to Zero.
DeleteBut nevermind that, what does that have to do with anything? Zero is a long running per-established character, that branched off into his own sub series story arc, how does that compare or relate to a random Hollywood live action movie completely made up and has nothing to do with anything?
Also what kind of logic is that? I'm hungry from a drought of food so I'll literally eat rotten garbage, is the analogy I think of. Skrew that! If I'm paying for the food Imma want the one that doesn't make me sick just cause I'm hungry. And that's life threatening stuff so imagine my discernment when it comes to pure entertainment.
I'm not foaming-at-the-mouth, nerd-raging at anything that's tiniest of changes. But there is nothing to be grateful for either.
DeleteMovies based on videos games...scratch that, movies in anything have a very low percent of being good. And having directors use buzz words like "Primal" feels like they trying to convince themselves of it's success more than anyone.
EVery single comment in here is lacking any optimism for this project. Yeah, I get it “Primal” and “Emotional” may not be the best choice of words to explain the character/game or whatever, but cmon people, we are getting a MEGA MAN MOVIE!!! Like said above, I’m a massive fan, like I’m sure everyone is in here. Let’s be a bit thankful that some is trying to make this happen and send some positivity there way. Put some good vibes in the universe and you never know, it could very well be exactly everything we’d hoped for.
ReplyDeleteI for one am looking forward to this and wish Mattson, Ariel, Henry and Masi all the best. I can’t wait to take my kids to theatre to share this moment with them.
I dun care. We got a Mario Bros movie in the 90s and it was terrible.
DeleteI'm feeling like their biggest problem is going to be finding a kid to play Mega Man, and make a design that works.
ReplyDeleteDetective Pikachu had the advantage of being able to make the yellow critter in CGI.
This actually been my biggest concern and the main reason why I think this is going to fail.
DeleteWell Pokemon movies have always been fairly consistent in their quality, so people weren't going to be too harsh on it.
DeletePlease, I want a good/great movie. I trust you Capcom.
ReplyDeleteAfter the Legend of Chun-Li, I don't.
DeleteAfter Street Fighter, Legend of Chun Li, Resident Evil, more Resident Evil, Resident Evil AGAIN, Resident Evil YET AGAIN, Resident Evil ONE MORE TIME and Resident Evil beating an undead horse...
DeleteWho in there right mind WOULD?
I'm impressed they managed to make something worse than the original Street Fighter movie. At least some of the outfits were good, and Raul Julia. Legend of Chun-Li wasn't even a half-hearted attempt at a SF movie considering Bison had more in common with Geese Howard.
DeleteOh Gods that movie was so boring!
Delete@Tiny Proto I liked the first SF movie. It was corny, but still fun. Although Mortal Kombat outclassed it.
DeleteI'd be far more interested if they were like, "Mega Man has a bold and stunning visual identity. And it's a world full of colorful and iconic characters. We're excited to utilize the latest in modern technology to bring it all to life on the big screen!"
ReplyDeleteThis just sounds like someone had an idea for a story and they slapped the Maga Man branding upon it as an afterthought.
God....
ReplyDeleteI don't know what they mean by primal, but this is probably the first hope I've had for this movie in all the years of talk.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know this statement's putting some people off, but I'm actually up for this sort of take on Classic. I was personally hoping the movie would shy away from the "goofy comedy" angle that you'd expect a Mario or Sonic movie to take.
DeleteBy "emotional", I'm hoping they mean something like the Astro Boy manga, or the Megamix/Gigamix manga. By no means am I calling for the movie to be like the Netflix Castlevania series. But I think on the scale of tone, a Classic movie should take its story and characters at least a bit seriously, especially if they plan on using Proto Man or doing an X series at some point, as unrealistic as the latter idea may be.
Will they respect the source material tho? Because with that statement it doesn't feel like it
ReplyDelete"I don’t want to say what our comps are because it might betray a little bit too much, but it is not squarely in the kid territory. But I don’t think that that’s an R-rated movie either."
ReplyDelete"But you know what is the story at the center? They’re like, what is it that this character can really go through?"
If this goes the "coming of age" route amidst division and servitude with light-hearted interjections of robotic/A.I. and human relations subplots, it'd actually be pretty impactful for the franchise because it was relevant. But at this point, I just don't trust Hollywood's process (nevermind individual writers or directors and such) to crank out something that is faithfully in-line with the original series' tone for character interactions and expertly-nuanced in humor and character development. Could literally rework copied-and-pasted portions of Ultron/Vision scripting from Avengers just to be safe, but I don't even see that happening without a plethora of SNAFU's. We'll see.
"Mega Man Movie Screenwriter Wants to Tell a 'Primal and Emotional' Story"
ReplyDeleteWow. First, The Protomen get a comic book adaptation. Now, their work's getting a movie? Goo'ness gracious~
For some reason this comment made me laugh. XD
DeleteI Hate Hollywood and really don't trust them..especially with franchises that I love.
ReplyDeleteAlso,Many apologies for any offensive previous posts,Protodude, I assure you it Won't happen again. Forgive?
Sounds like somebody's embarassed that they have to write a screenplay for a movie based on a video game. Scenarios like this often result in shoddy productions that have little-to-nothing to do with the source material save for a few familiar names attached to characters that don't represent them.
ReplyDeleteI smell another Dragonball: Evolution on the horizon.
Hey, I liked Dragonball Evolution.
DeleteI mean, not as a Dragon Ball movie or story, but as a generic action movie full of magic and demons.
NO LIVE ACTION! IT WILL BE A GIANT FAIL!
ReplyDeleteWell they are ensuring that my money is nice and safe in my wallet. After that scatterbrained interview where they deliberately did not talk about the movie, my expectations dropped even lower.
ReplyDeleteInternet is filled with hundreds and hundreds of free games, played by people from all parts of the world. Regardless of their age or occupation, all of them enjoy the multitude of online games present on the internet that become a passion for them should they spend a large amount of time playing them. https://www.buyyoutubesubscribers.in/
ReplyDelete