Opinion: it'll probably be terrible, but we still can't wait for the Out Run movie

It’s been a bit of a red letter month for me, or perhaps more accurately a red Testarossa month. News recently broke that fresh off the back of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, which generated a billion dollars and introduced a whole new generation of kids to Jim Carrey’s hypermobile face, Sega’s next Hollywood project is going to be a movie based on legendary arcade racing game Out Run.

This appeals to me on two counts. Firstly I’m a huge fan of the original video game, and secondly, I find bad movies just as entertaining as good ones. Yes I’m aware there’s something wrong with me.

Alright, we don’t know for sure the Out Run movie will be terrible. It’ll feature talented Euphoria and White Lotus star Sydney Sweeney, who is also a producer on the project, and Michael Bay has been attached to direct. Regardless of how you feel about the dizzying CGI washing machine that is the Transformers franchise, if you’ve seen his 1996 movie The Rock you’ll know the man can direct a Ferrari car chase.

The problem is, describing the Out Run game as light on plot is like describing War and Peace as “a bit long”. There is a start line, a finish line, and you are compelled to drive between the two by the immaculate summer roadtrip vibes. With such a thin premise, the writers of the movie are going to feel obliged to introduce things like shadowy criminal gangs, a soupçon of personal tragedy and an irritating comic relief character just to keep the story moving along.

The Need for Speed movie released in 2014 took that approach and disappeared mostly without a trace, even though it starred Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and, thanks to its exceptionally crashy race sequences, featured more irretrievably ruined supercars than the car park at Mansory.

Sony’s Gran Turismo tie-in movie avoided the cliches only because it was a film less about the content of the game itself and more about the real life winner of the GT Academy competition Jann Mardenborough. And even then it threw in an incongruous Grand Theft Auto-inspired police chase that implied the otherwise clean-cut Jann should have spent the second half of the film in a local magistrate’s court rather than at a racetrack.

Look, I’ve seen enough dire video game adaptations to know that, statistically, the Out Run movie will almost certainly be a disaster, if it makes it to cinema screens at all. Still I can’t help being just a little excited for the prospect of a sun-kissed road movie based on one of the most influential racing games of all time.

Shows like The Last of Us and Fallout have demonstrated these days Hollywood has an improved understanding of what makes video games tick. And if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll happily waste 112 minutes sitting in the dark drooling over a Ferrari Testarossa. In fact that’s been a fairly standard evening for me since the age of six.