Well, it's finally happening. The most beautiful star in Hollywood is set to head up a videogame adaptation: Michael Bay is directing an OutRun film for some reason (via Deadline). That's the 1986 Sega arcade game and subsequent series about driving Ferraris at great speeds down visually confounding roads in order to impress your girlfriend. Also, Sydney Sweeney will produce it but apparently not star in it, thank you very much.
It's no surprise, really. This is the golden age of videogame adaptations. Fallout was great, everyone's raving about The Last of Us, the Sonic movies have made enough money to bend light around Jim Carrey, and A Minecraft Movie continues to print cash despite the deleterious effect it's apparently had on the morals of world youth.
So no wonder Sega is plumbing its archives for another trademark to turn into a Hollywood money-hose. And hey, honestly? I could imagine an OutRun movie actually being good, if it leant fully into the weirdo 'driving fantasy' vibes of the games and produced something like a speedier, 90-minute version of the Wicked Game scene from Wild At Heart.
But I'm not optimistic this Bay-fronted feature will do that, and fully expect some kind of less-good Fast and Furious from the whole thing. Besides Bay and Sweeney, the only other name currently attached to the thing (aside from a smattering of Sega execs) is scriptwriter Jayson Rothwell, whose IMDb filmography does not fill me with confidence.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, and if Rothwell and/or Bay and/or Sweeney are truly burning up with bold ideas for an OutRun film, I encourage them to ignore my mithering entirely. But the vibes around this thing, even at this early stage, don't scream box office gold to me. But hey, look on the bright side: it can't be worse than Borderlands.
