There’s a Pac-Man movie coming. Normally that would be a head-scratcher of a headline enough considering the lack of plot, characters, and theme in the game, but this one has a secondary twist: It’s going to be live-action. That’s right — Bandai Namco Entertainment and Wayfarer Studios, mostly known for teenage romances, are working together on a live-action Pac-Man movie. Many, many questions abound.
As fun as it might be to watch a giant yellow dot chomp on little white dots in a maze while ghosts chase it around for 90 minutes, the film will probably have to have a bit more of a plot than that. There’s really three ways they can go about this. The first is something like the upcoming Tetris movie, where it’s not actually an adaptation of the game but about the game itself. The second is a complete and total makeover for the game where Pac-Man is actually a yellow-clad space marine hellbent on destroying the Ghost Army as it chomps its way through the universe, but the only way to do that is to discover the mythical Big Dot Bomb. The third, and most likely, is that they’ll take the anthropomorphic Pac-Man from the later Pac-Man games (and Super Smash Bros.) and plop him into the real world to… deal with the Ghost Army by finding the Big Dot Bomb.
That third suggestion is most likely what is going to happen because the film is based off an original idea from Chuck Williams, who was a producer on Sonic the Hedgehog. Everyone thought they were mad to do that when it was first announced it was live-action, but after a few million dollars in corrections they turned out to make not one, but two enjoyable Sonic films. If you can pull that movie miracle off, why not do it again for Pac-Man?
I mean, the lack of talking and the general lack of storyline are two reasons, of course. Maybe they’ll pull a Groot-style thing and make a famous person only say the pack man chomping sound and nothing else for the entire film while James Marsden makes that one confused face he makes.
