Crash Bandicoot may not be as popular as he used to be, but three decades ago he was one of PlayStation’s first breakout original characters. But when former Sony executive Shuji Utsumi attempted to get Hollywood interested in making a Crash Bandicoot movie, he was given the cold shoulder by film executives.
Utsumi–who is currently the CEO of Sega of America–told The Game Business about his attempt to bring Crash Bandicoot to the big screen. Despite the success of the games–from 1996 to 2010, Sony released a Crash-related game nearly every year–no one seemed to share Utsumi’s vision for what the film could be.
“When I started to get involved in the video game business, I picked up Crash Bandicoot and started asking some of the movie studios if they were interested in turning that property into a movie,” recalled Utsumi. “But I was treated like, ‘hey, video games is like a toy business.’ They didn’t really take it seriously.”