The popular but unforgiving video game where your character ages with each respawn is getting brought to life as a feature.
The video game Sifu from developers Slocap is an unforgiving test of endurance and Netflix is now bringing the popular title to life. This will actually not be the first time the game is adapted into a narrative project as the Prime Video anthology series Secret Level drew upon numerous video game titles for their episodes and Sifu is included amongst them. However, the Sifu segment in Secret Level was done in a style that’s very faithful to the animation look of the video game. Netflix’s movie will be a full-on live-action adaptation.
The story of the game, per Deadline, “tells a story of revenge set in modern-day China. It follows the student of a martial arts school’s master (Sifu) as he seeks to avenge the murder of his mentor. The twist, however, is that thanks to a magical talisman, each time our hero dies, he’s resurrected, but the price paid is that he ages with every use. And should he become too old too fast, his death shall become permanent, and his quest unfulfilled.”
John Wick director Chad Stahelski’s 87Eleven production company will be producing the project along with Story Kitchen. Stahelski will be on board as a producer with Jason Spritz and Alex Young. They will work alongside Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg for Story Kitchen. Executive producers of the movie will include Timothy I. Stevenson and Elena Sandoval. Jeff Ludwig will also be on board as an executive producer with Sloclap’s Jordan Layani and Pierre Tarno joining the fray. Sifu had sold over one million copies within the first three weeks of its release across platforms such as Playstation and Xbox.
Meanwhile, Stahelski is hard at work on his Highlander reboot with Henry Cavill in tow. He revealed recently that the movie will completely shift the timeline we might expect, saying, “We’re bringing it forward from the early 1500s in the highlands to the beyond present-day New York and Hong Kong, and seeing how it goes. There’s big opportunity for action. There’s a chance to play a character that not a lot of people get to play. And it’s a bit of a love story, but not how you think. On John Wick, I learned a lot on how to bend the storytelling a little… another kind of myth.”
