Hugely Popular Fighting Game Being Turned Into A Movie
A very popular fighting game is being adapted to a feature-length animated movie. This one actually has a real story behind it as well.
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Video games that are a fighting game at their core can always be a little tricky to develop into movies because they often require a heavy lift around creating a new story and background for all of the action. We’ve seen it done a number of times, even recently, but the returns are often diminishing. This next adaptation might be different though with the announcement that DC is developing a new film about one of its most popular games. Injustice: Gods Among Us is becoming a feature-length animated film in the next couple of years.
Unlike other ones, this fighting game actually does have an in-depth story behind it that lends itself to a much stronger narrative arc than we’ve seen in the past. Injustice: Gods Among Us is a fighting game that pits different DC characters in one-on-one fighting matchups against each other. In this way, it’s a lot like other games we’ve seen from the genre. A player picks his/her character and the action ensues. But this game is built on the back of an alternate DC Universe in which some of the narratives are flipped.
Injustice: Gods Among Us posits an alternate DC reality in which Superman is the antagonist and the breadth of the Justice League and other characters from DC are tasked with fighting him. In this fighting game, Superman has become the ruled of society, governing in a violent and all-encompassing way. The backstory for the game has it that Joker tricked Superman into killing Lois Lane and their unborn baby. Then Metropolis gets nuked, leading to Superman taking over the world.
After these events go down Superman goes on a revenge tour, killing villains and heroes in his way before finally taking control of the United States. He recruits some heroes and also villains to work with him but there is a resistance force, led by Batman who aims to take him down. Justice League characters from an alternate universe are teleported in to help and this is where the fighting game takes off. It’s these alternate universe characters who are there to fight and stop Superman, aided by technology that helps bring their strength up to his level.
Conceptually, this fighting game is remarkably similar to the Knightmare timeline we saw in the final cut and scenes from Zack Snyder’s Justice League. At the end of the movie, it’s let on that Superman has taken control of Earth and turned the United States into a barren hellscape. With the Joker as the roaming and psychotic sheriff, the final interactions let on that Lois has died, and Batman is leading a small group of resistance fighters.
When it was first released, the fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us was a hit becoming the highest-selling in the United States when it hit shelves. It also spawned a sequel, Injustice 2. The announcement for the movie came in the form of liner notes in the press release for the special edition of Batman: The Long Halloween Part 2. There’s currently no timeline on when the movie will be released, but it’s sure to tell a very cool story, one we could actually see played out at some point in a live-action format.
