Film producer Avi Arad, former boss of Marvel Studios, will appear at Namco Bandai's 30th birthday event for Pac-Man on June 15, where he will help them announce a new Pac-Man project. The speculation raging online is that the Spider-Man producer may announce there that he's developing a feature film version of the classic videogame.Namco Bandai announced in February that Arad would act as an executive adviser/consultant for them. "We plan to ask Mr. Arad for advice on content creation and worldwide development of games, video pictures, music and other content business in general, and on strengthening our overseas Toys and Hobby business," they said in a statement then. You'll notice there was no mention of Arad helping them develop movie adaptations of their games, but considering his background it's a reasonable leap to make.
More recently, Arad spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference where he declared that videogames would succeed comic books as the source of a new wave of Hollywood movie adaptations. "Very much like when we started with comics, we need one runaway success to make it very clear that this is a great source material," Arad said.
While there is no clear-cut available evidence that Arad is developing a Pac-Man movie, it's curious to note that Arad's producing partner Steven Paul and his company Crystal Sky have been trying to get a Pac-Man movie off the ground since as far back as 2002; Pac-Man and Castlevania were among the five films covered under a $200 million financing deal Crystal Sky struck in May 2008 with Grosvenor Park. Paul is also Arad's partner in the production company Seaside Entertainment and his fellow producer on Bratz and Ghost Rider and on in-development projects such as Ghost in the Shell, Lost Planet, Robosapien, and Maximum Ride. Paul is also a producer on the forthcoming live-action Tekken movie.
We'll know for certain if there's really a Pac-Man movie in the works or not come June 15.
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