The original Contra is one of those games that should be on every NES console, direct clone, or emulator. The odyssey of Bill and Lance to destroy the Red Falcon Organization and its alien masterminds is already over 30 years old, and it hasn't lost its appeal at any point, but it seems that the Chinese production company Beijing Starlit Movie and TV Culture has everything ready to start work on a big-screen adaptation. There will be some adjustments to the original story, and social media has already begun speculating about possible actors.
Damn the Energy Zone and its dirty tricks, because that's where all my perfect runs turn to dust. Yes, Contra can still give me a beating, and I imagine the same happened to the millions of players who bought the now-discontinued NES Classic Mini... as long as they hacked the console and added the game manually, because Nintendo decided to preinstall Super Contra, its sequel. The saga has more than a dozen titles, and if memory serves, two slot machines (you know, Konami). Over time, it established a story rich enough to explore other formats, which inevitably translates to cinema.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/iukdTPaPIVEA live-action movie is in the works
The news about a live-action adaptation of Contra began circulating in the last days of April, but it was revived by Western media this week. Why do I say "Western"? Essentially because the movie will be made in China. The company Beijing Starlit Movie and TV Culture received state approval for a script that plans to move the action to an island in the South China Sea. The plot begins in 1988, when scientists Chen Qiang and Li Zhiyong visit the island after a meteorite impact. The initial investigation reveals nothing, but thirty years later the Red Falcon Organization emerges there, and Chen sends the Contra team consisting of Bill and Lance to neutralize this new threat.
And... that's it. Just a small 16-second teaser and a snippet of the supposed script. Another huge doubt lies in the cast. Early rumors point to Jing Tian, the beautiful actress who shared the screen with Matt Damon in The Great Wall and with Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island. In the original story there are no women, but that changed with the release of Contra: Evolution, exclusive to the Chinese market. Could we see another initiative presenting Chinese and Western actors? If we consider the performance of The Great Wall (it lost 75 million dollars, and it will depend on TV rights and streaming to recover them) the most likely answer is no, though we've been surprised before...
