Get ready for the South Town Cinematic Universe.
In the latter part of the 20th century, SNK was a purveyor of popular and influential arcade and video games such as Fatal Fury and The Art of Fighting. Many were set in a fictional American city known as South Town. Now, those games are in development to be a cornerstone of The Arena, the indie production banner formerly known as Arena SNK that launched last year by former studio executive-turned-producer Erik Feig.
Fatal Fury and The Art of Fighting, along with Metal Slug, Samurai Showdown and others, are being adapted into movies, shows, anime and manga with top Hollywood talent. Feig and his lieutenants, former Universal executive Matt Reilly and former Crunchyroll marketing exec Markus Gerdemann, are not stopping with just adaptations but are hoping to build engaged fan and pop culture community with its stories and products.
“Yes, we’re a brand new production studio living at the intersection of gaming, anime and event action,” said Feig. “But one of the key directives, especially with our portfolio, is to find those fandom communities and deliver to them early, often and everywhere they are.”
The South Town collection of SNK games were crime and martial arts offerings, and proved to be influential on filmmakers such as Takashi Miike and Quentin Tarantino and on later video games such as Street Fighter and Grand Theft Auto. The games were known for being character and story-based, something that could give the producers a leg up in world-building.
“South Town has a passionate fan base and extended and cool narrative and characters that offers a lot to play with,” explained Feig about Arena’s focus on that piece of its portfolio. “It’s not just a fighting game. If you’re a lover of anime or inspirational movies, if you’re interested in gritty crime or emotional storylines, if you love MMA or globetrotting adventures, we’ve got you covered.”
On the features side, Arena is in active development on Fatal Fury, commissioning a script from David S. Goyer, best known for his work on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Batman movies and for co-creating the recent Apple TV series Foundation. The project tells of two brothers, Terry and Andy Bogard, who watch their adoptive father be killed by South Town crime boss Geese Howard. Then, after years of training, they return for a revenge-soaked combat tournament.
At the same time, the company is developing Geese, inspired by The Godfather movies, to tell the origin story of Geese Howard as he is born into a violent underworld and forged by pain and betrayal to become the insidious villain of South Town. Grant Singer, the filmmaker behind Benicio del Toro and Justin Timberlake-starring neo-noir Netflix movie Reptile, is writing the script and will direct. It would star a different, much younger actor than the Fatal Fury version of Geese, and is said to be positioned as this universe’s answer to DC’s Joker movie.
Arena has also teamed with Skybound, the Robert Kirkman-led company that is behind Amazon’s hit Invincible, to produce an animated Fatal Fury series. Titled Fatal Fury: The Vow, the series will focus on the formative years of the brothers as they go on asearchfor meaning, vocation, and of course, training. The brothers’ paths converge again in shared vengeance: One driven by fury, the other by discipline.
The series will likely be made for YouTube, which Arena sees as having the biggest audience reach. And the company wants to work with super fans and influencers during the development process.
And finally there is an Art of Fighting webtoon being developed by Brandon Chen, the author behind the supernatural crime webtoon Double Kill, and the vampire adventure Blood System. The logline for the webtoon describes it as “an action-packed two-hander that pairstwo viciousrivals together to go deep into the hardened streets of South Town to save the friend and love of their lives.”
During a recent visit to the Arena Los Angeles offices, Feig said Art of Fighting will be the first title to hit the marketplace and is intended to set up the world of South Town.
The multi-pronged approach is designed to take into account the long production times to bring titles to the market while also meeting fans at all the different media entry points.
“Things happen in different production cycles,” Feig said. “So how do these things help each other exist, and how do we try and reach the audience in a way that they’re consuming media, which is all over the place, in a lot of different ways. We’re using that same approach for every kind of thing that we’re trying to do.”
Arena is being built around the idea of “being a living and breathing part of a lot of people’s lives on a daily basis,” Feig explained. “See the movie, play this game, read this webtoon, go check out this anime. But it’s about a whole ecosystem of conversation and connection that we are trying to offer as well.”
Gerdemann is key in building out that fan connection. As a marketing exec at Sony, he helped transform Funimation and Crunchyroll into the names they are today and helped elevate anime culturally. He described it as “creating culture with purpose.”
Reilly’s task is to develop and make screen stories across the various platforms. He said the company has “a north star mantra called ‘muscular prestige.’” He continued: “We want everything to obviously strive for quality and excellence but also deliver something singular that is going to live up to the expectations of the IP we’re honoring.”
For the movies, Arena plans to work with co-financiers and distribution partners. And it does not want to just be limited to making SNK game titles, even though that’s an IP owned by Arena’s Saudi-backed investor MiSK Group. (Saudi-backed MBC is also an investor.)
It wants to develop originals, which means taking in pitches and looking at books. Its financial backers are supportive of this approach, he said.
And the company, which officially launched in January, has a startup mentality to it, in that it wants to move fast but deliberately, in a nimble fashion.
Borrowing a phrase from filmmaker Pete Berg, who may have borrowed it from Navy SEALS, Feig said the thinking is “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
“Usually, you can move really fast but you don’t have the ability to get stuff done. Or you can get stuff done but there is group think and a lot of people involved and you make choices that are too safe,” said Feig. “Here we can actually do both. We can go for it and we can do it nimbly and dynamically.”
Courtesy of The Arena