Amazon partners with basketball legend Steph Curry to make a ToeJam & Earl movie
No, I did not generate this headline with Mad Libs.
If you've got an intellectual property, Jeff Bezos wants to make a film out of it. Next up on Amazon's docket of movies to make is ToeJam & Earl, Sega's 1990s hip-hop-themed roguelike that was most recently resurrected in 2019's ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove.
Spotted by The Hollywood Reporter, the film is being worked on by Amazon Studios in collaboration with NBA superstar Stephen Curry's Unanimous Media and Story Kitchen, a media company helmed by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad and Sonic the Hedgehog producer Dmitri Johnson. What a potent admixture.
Personally, I'm hoping the resulting feature somehow unites these disparate threads into a slickly-choreographed rap-focused action flick with basketball elements and also Sonic the Hedgehog is there. Sadly it'll probably just be, like, a normal movie.
The screenplay is being written by Nunzio Randazzo and Amos Vernon, both of whom recently worked on Hotel Transylvania: Transformania. It'll centre on ToeJam and Earl's quest to find a cure for a disease that's devastating their home planet's funk levels. That mission brings them to Earth, the place where "the music that created their culture originated".
It's far from Amazon's only gaming-related movie project right now, but it might be the most left-field choice the company has made so far. Amazon is also working on films or TV shows based around Blade Runner, Fallout, Mass Effect, Disco Elysium and Life Is Strange. A film derived from a '90s roguelike about rapping aliens collecting spaceship parts is a bit of an odd duck among that collection, but not an unwelcome one.