Tekken To Be Rebooted

I’m going to go ahead and call this good news, purely because nothing can be worse than the last two efforts for this series.  Especially the second movie, which was rated 2/10 in our review and the trailer for which on our YouTube channel has one of the worst dislike ratios I’ve seen recently, for a video with 1.2 million views, so people agree in general.

They are rebooting the Tekken series, says Variety.  Chinese business platform, Financing City Network, are set to bankroll the venture.  Other than that, not much is known, apart from the fact that the people involved in the previous slurry need to be kept at great distances from it.

The deal is part of a ten picture programme with a collective budget of $300 million, so perhaps if we apply some crude math we could deduce that this movie could in theory have a budget of around $30 million, which I suppose might not be such a bad thing.

The first video game, released to arcades 21 years ago and the Sony Playstation 20 years ago, saw a Japanese criminal tycoon (Heihachi Mishima) hold a martial arts tournament, with his loner son (Kazuya) kicking the ass of everyone, narrowly defeating Paul Phoenix in the final and taking over his father’s business.

Geoff Meed was initially cast as Paul Phoenix

If they want to make a good movie out of the above, just stick to the damned basics.  No international intrigue convoluted mess of a plot, with no familiar characters and a shaking camera.

Incidentally, speaking of Paul Phoenix, despite being one of the most popular characters, he was not used in either of the previous two movies.  In the first movie, martial artist and actor Geoff Meed, who I spoke to around the time, said he tried out for the role of Paul Phoenix and was basically cast, but was then removed from the final product.

I think all real Tekken nerds would be happy if this was a simple but effective movie that drove towards a brutal fight between Kazuya Mishima and Paul Phoenix, with of course Heihachi Mishimi getting involved in the mix.  I can think of no better actor to fill in as Paul Phoenix than Geoff Meed.  The other two, I’m not so sure.

And now, for some nostalgia.  Yeah, it’s Tekken 2, but Tekken 2 in my view is the single greatest video game ever created.