Aside from a short created for Adult Swim twelve years ago, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series has never been considered for adaption in animated form, despite having the perfect look for it. We love the live-action movie, don’t get us wrong, but we’ve always wanted to see a fully cartoon take on what’s essentially a cartoon anyway.
2021 is a good year to be into Scott Pilgrim. The movie is coming back to theaters, the video game is finally getting a rerelease, and the Scott Pilgrim miniatures game, previously only available through the Kickstarter campaign that happened back in 2019, is now available at hobby shops nationwide.
I remember what it was like eleven years ago when Scott Pilgrim Vs The World was first released. There was hype among the nerd crowd before the film was even out, but on opening weekend, it was up against “The Expendables,” an action throwback picture starring a slew of 80s-tough-guy-movie veterans, and “Eat Pray Love,” a Julia Roberts vehicle for the Oprah crowd. On the surface there wouldn’t seem to be much overlap between the intended audiences for those films, so Scott should’ve had the all-important youth market sewn up, right? ….Didn’t work out that way.
Ask any collector of physical games and they’ll tell you: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game is the one title that should have been given a physical release when it came out on the PS3 back in 2010. Viewed by its publisher as a mere promotional tie-in to the movie (which came out at the same time), the game was digital-only back when that meant certain doom by deletion. After its removal from online merchants in late 2014, it not only became impossible to buy, but impossible to re-download. The only way anyone could play it was if they owned a console that already had the game installed on it.
This week, EW.com published an excellent interview with Edgar Wright, the director of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. 2020 marks the tenth anniversary of the cult classic film, which lost at the box office to a stale Stallone movie yet has grown in popularity in the years since. Wright was joined by the lead actors from the movie: Michael Cera as Scott, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers, Chris Evans as Lucas Lee and others.
Two thoughts run through your mind when you’re staring at the box for Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Card Game: