Before Sucker Punch spent all its time building superhero games with difficult moral choices, they were best known for the Sly Cooper games, a series where the cute talking animals belied the surprisingly well-engineered stealth mechanics and the hard-as-nails gameplay where one hit could kill you. And now, apparently, a theatrical film is on the way.
The trailer’s a pretty straightforward introduction for Sly, Murray and Bentley, but it’s amusing and if nothing else it’s got something of the feel of the games:
As for how faithful it’ll be, it looks like they’re not taking too many liberties. According to the Sly Cooper Facebook page, it largely sticks to the plot of the first game in the broad strokes:
Sly learns of his birth family’s secret legacy; that he comes from a long line of talented and international thieves. Endowed with this knowledge, Sly and his friends are catapulted into a global adventure as they race to reassemble pieces of an ancient book holding The Cooper Clan’s family secrets before it can fall into the hands of Clockwerk – an evil Russian metallic owl bent on ending the Cooper family line.
So that’s the good news. The movie is being written and directed by Kevin Munroe, who directed… er, the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that never went anywhere, and Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. So that may be variable news, depending on how you feel about those movies, but it seems unlikely Sucker Punch will allow Sony to run roughshod over a character that’s arguably their mascot.
This won’t be on screens until 2016, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will be accompanied by another Sly Cooper game with that kind of time frame. And if nothing else, it’s nice to see the sneaky critter get his due. Now, Sony, how about a Ratchet and Clank theatrical film?