“Let’s make 5 movies!” — Sherry McKenna, 1993
Oddworld’s history places their origin at Rhythm & Hues, where Lorne Lanning had worked in feature films, advertising, station idents and motion-based attractions, and where he met McKenna, already an accomplished producer. He persuaded her first to work at Rhythm & Hues, then spent two years persuading her to co-found a video game company with him. McKenna’s resistance was understandable: to her, video games were ugly, confusing and noisy. Lanning’s counterargument was that games could be beautiful, intuitive and meaningful, and that they could carry the kind of story and design ambition she associated with higher-end visual media. In September 1994, Oddworld Inhabitants was born. That origin story has always felt slightly prophetic, because Oddworld came from film people who chose games in order to build something that film, at the time, could not yet support: a living, satirical, interactive creature universe about exploitation, empathy, industrial appetite and spiritual rebellion. The strange reversal is that a film may now be the thing that helps games rescue Oddworld’s future. The medium McKenna knew, and the medium Lanning insisted upon, may finally need each other.
That is the full-circle argument. Oddworld does not need a film because every game property now apparently needs a film, nor because the industry has decided that recognisable titles should be stripped for parts and fed into content pipelines. Oddworld needs a film because Oddworld has always been part film already. It was built by people who understood lenses, staging, creature silhouettes, performance, visual rhythm and the emotional power of ugly-beautiful design. It arrived on PlayStation in 1997 as Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, followed by Abe’s Exoddus in 1998, Munch’s Oddysee in 2001, Stranger’s Wrath in 2005, New ’n’ Tasty in 2014 and Soulstorm in 2021, with ports and remasters keeping the catalogue moving across platforms. The official Oddworld site says the company’s products have passed twenty million combined sales since it began self-publishing to digital storefronts in 2008, which is enough to prove a durable audience but not enough to make Oddworld feel culturally secure. It remains beloved, strange, half-buried, revived, paused, reintroduced, reimagined and waiting. It is famous to the right people, not famous enough to the wider world. That is precisely the kind of property a film can help, provided the film understands that Abe is not a mascot in search of a brand extension. He is a worker in a death factory who discovers the product is going to be him.
Oddworld’s relationship with film is not speculative fan romance. In 1998, Oddworld Inhabitants submitted Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus for Academy Award consideration in the Animated Short category. The Los Angeles Times reported that the fifteen-minute film followed Abe trying to save his people from annihilation, while Wired described the all-CG minimovie as an industry first, produced over nine months by twenty-seven artists and tied directly to the game’s cinematic material. Lanning even told Wired in 1998 that Oddworld’s production model was more accustomed to the feature-film industry than to games. That line now reads like a clue left in plain sight. Oddworld was always trying to move across forms, and in 2006 the company announced Citizen Siege, a planned CG feature with Vanguard Animation, with Lanning attached to direct and McKenna producing. That was not an Abe movie, but it confirmed the same larger instinct: Oddworld Inhabitants had never seen games as a narrow lane. The studio wanted universes, films, games, political fables, creature characters and long-range mythology. The timing simply never aligned cleanly.
The timing may now be better. As of 5 July 2026, there is no confirmed Abe feature announcement, so 2027 has to be treated here as hope and pitch rather than news. The most recent public stir came from a June 2026 “Part 3 coming” tease, which VGC reported as possible new-game speculation; the fan archive Oddwords later tracked a clarification that this was a misunderstanding around segmented Soulstorm cutscene posts, not a confirmed third instalment. That little confusion actually says something useful: people still want the signal. They are still watching the feed, still reading into fragments, still waiting for the next proper shape to emerge. Oddworld does not feel dead. It feels dormant, and dormant is very different from finished. (Wikipedia) (Oddworld)
The obvious commercial comparison is Mario, because The Super Mario Bros. Movie made $1.36 billion worldwide and proved that an animated game adaptation could become a huge cross-generational event when it respected the iconography, moved quickly, used a broad voice cast and understood that the film itself was only one part of a larger retail, streaming, toy and soundtrack machine. Its celebrity cast was central to the campaign: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key and Seth Rogen gave the film mainstream press weight far beyond the existing Nintendo audience. Oddworld should study that success without copying its surface. Abe is not Mario, RuptureFarms is not the Mushroom Kingdom, and Oddworld’s appeal is not bright comfort. Oddworld is corporate horror with slapstick timing. It is labour satire, ecological grotesque, absurdist food advertising, spiritual rescue story and creature comedy. Its film should be entirely animated, but it should not be sanded into safe family gloss. It should sit somewhere between the tactile comic ugliness of the original games and the heavier cinematic scale of Soulstorm: old Abe clarity, newer production value, no generic sheen. (Box Office Mojo) (EW.com)
The style question is vital because Soulstorm, for all its ambition, is not quite the correct total visual answer for a first Abe film. Soulstorm has scale, density, dramatic lighting and a more serious revolutionary weight, but the original Abe’s Oddysee had a simplicity that remains powerful: big readable silhouettes, smoky industrial rooms, vulgar food branding, deadpan signs, rubbery expressions, simple gestures, pitch-black jokes, painted wilderness and an almost storybook sense of evil machinery. The film should fuse both periods without becoming trapped by either. The old style gives Abe his immediate charm and comedy; the newer style gives the world grandeur and modern cinematic force. A successful film would not make Abe cute in the ordinary plush-toy way, even though plushies should absolutely exist. It would make him lovable because he is anxious, breakable, funny, morally awake and physically unsuited to heroism. Lanning’s own comments on Abe line up with this: Game Developer quoted him saying he gave Abe infinite lives because he wanted players to never give up, and the same piece records his preference for vulnerable, empathetic characters over conventional heroic power fantasies. That is the emotional key. Abe is not an action hero in disguise. He is the floor worker who becomes unbearable to the machine because he starts caring properly. (Game Developer)
The film’s Act One should stay almost entirely inside RuptureFarms. Do not begin in prophecy, lore, tribal ceremony or cosmic explanation. Begin with the job. Abe waxes floors, follows orders, avoids punishment, repeats workplace phrases, navigates signage, dodges Sligs and accepts the factory’s logic because he has never been given any other logic. RuptureFarms should be funny before it becomes horrifying, because that is how Oddworld works best. The viewer should understand the products, the slogans, the staff announcements, the safety videos, the Glukkon boardroom culture, the assembly lines, the miserable employee routines and the casual cruelty of a company that has converted living creatures into snack categories. Then Abe sees the truth: business is bad, the old food sources are running out, and Mudokons are next. That premise remains one of the cleanest in games. A little stitched-mouth worker in a meat factory discovers that he and his people are about to become the meat. The first act ends with escape, but it should not feel triumphant. Abe escapes because he panics, improvises, runs, hides and survives long enough to reach the world outside. He has not yet become a saviour. He has become a witness.
Act Two should be the world beyond the factory, and this is where the film earns the name Oddworld rather than merely RuptureFarms: the wilderness, the old temples, the Paramites, the Scrabs, the free Mudokons, the feeling that the industrial world did not merely enslave Abe’s body but damaged his understanding of himself. This section should be dangerous, comic and sacred, but never solemn for too long. Abe should fail constantly. He should misread rituals, annoy guides, get chased, get dropped, get bitten, misunderstand instructions, and slowly discover that the ancient world is not there to validate him instantly. He is not a chosen one because a logo lights up behind him. He becomes chosen through obligation. He learns that his fear is real, that his captivity shaped him, that freedom is awkward and that the people outside RuptureFarms are not waiting to applaud him. Some should distrust him. Some should pity him. Some should see him as factory-broken. Some should recognise something in him before he recognises it in himself. This is where the stitched mouth needs to carry meaning without speeches. Abe has been made small by design, and the film’s middle movement is the painful enlargement of his inner life.
Act Three should be the return. Abe goes back to RuptureFarms not because he is now powerful in the conventional sense, but because he has understood the moral shape of the story: escape alone is not enough. The last act should become a rescue machine, mixing suspense and comedy through production lines, vents, chanting, possession, Slig incompetence, Glukkon panic, bad corporate crisis language, jammed mechanisms, confused workers, near-misses, explosions and waves of Mudokons who are not background decoration but actual comic lives. Abe’s victory should not be a boss fight that turns him into a different genre. His victory should be liberation. He wins by waking others, not by becoming a warrior. Molluck should remain a perfect villain for this structure: frightening because he controls the system, ridiculous because he believes the system is morality, and pathetic because he cannot imagine existence beyond ownership, output and branding. The ending should preserve the original power of the tale while preparing a future. Abe does not fix Oddworld in one night. He cracks it open.
The voice strategy should be pragmatic without betraying the character. Lorne Lanning should remain central to Abe, because Abe’s voice is not replaceable decoration. Behind the Voice Actors lists Lanning as the voice of Abe across the series, and his connection to the character as creator, director and performer gives the film a living thread back to the games. A studio may be tempted to cast a huge name as Abe and sell the whole thing that way, but that would risk breaking the very thing the film needs most. The better Mario lesson is to use celebrity voices around the icon, not necessarily over the icon. Cast names for Molluck, the Glukkons, a Slig commander, a Mudokon elder, supporting workers, maybe a crooked ad-voice narrator, maybe even a ridiculous RuptureFarms training-video host. Bring in recognisable performers to help sell the trailer and give the press tour oxygen, but let Lorne carry Abe’s nervous rhythm, the odd little sounds, the tremor, the chant, the awkward comedy and the pain. The film can be commercially intelligent without misidentifying its soul. (Decider)
Then comes the studio question. Netflix is plausible because it still takes some risks in animation and has become a major home for game-adjacent animated work, including Arcane, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Castlevania-adjacent audience pathways, with Decider writing in 2022 that Netflix animation had been quietly continuing the animated video-game adaptation lane around Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Netflix could allow Oddworld to be stranger, darker, more adult in implication and less dependent on opening-weekend simplification. The risk is that an Oddworld film could arrive, trend briefly, vanish into the scroll and become another admired object inside an endless catalogue. Paramount is the hope because Oddworld deserves a theatrical push, and Paramount already has a proven live-action/CG game-adaptation business through Sonic. Sega announced in January 2025 that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 had passed $425 million worldwide, while also noting that the first two Sonic films had earned a combined $725.2 million globally and produced strong home-entertainment results. That is the kind of theatrical franchise machinery Oddworld would need if the aim is not merely to make a good film, but to make the world visible again. (Decider) (株式会社セガ) (AAP)
A successful Abe film would function as a marketing event for the next twenty years of Oddworld. That is the real business case. The film should lead directly into restored classics, a proper new flagship game, art books, vinyl soundtracks, making-of documentaries, short films, convention panels, limited figures, RuptureFarms parody packaging, Scrab and Paramite plush toys, Abe plushies that preserve his strangeness, Slig toys, Mudokon worker ID cards, replica signage, posters designed like cursed 1990s workplace propaganda and an annual OddCon that gives the community a fixed point of return. OddCon sounds silly only if one misunderstands how niche worlds become durable again. Fans need a date. They need a room. They need panels, concept art, development stories, old builds, speedruns, cosplay, merch tables, a keynote, a “what’s next” screen and a reason to feel that their weird old love is no longer hiding in the corner. Oddworld has the designs, slogans, creatures and history to support that. It has a world people can wear, collect, quote and gather around.
The next game, if the film worked, should not be timid. It does not need to imitate Red Dead Redemption literally, and it should not inflate itself into a bloated open-world checklist, but the desire for a larger Oddworld is completely understandable. Players want the planet back. They want regions, creatures, factories, routes, settlements, wilderness, rescue systems, comic danger, social mechanics, industrial spaces, sacred spaces and a sense of journey. Something with the confidence of a large adventure game, the charm and consequence of a strange Fable-like world, and the authored visual identity of Oddworld rather than the generic sprawl of modern franchise design. The film could do for Oddworld what trailers alone cannot: give the public an entry point clean enough to carry into a major release. “Abe is the little worker who escapes the meat factory and goes back to save everyone.” That is simple. That is funny. That is horrifying. That is marketable. That is Oddworld.
The deeper reason this could work in 2027 is that Oddworld’s subject has not aged out. If anything, its satire has become easier to understand. It is about workers treated as inventory, living systems converted into products, executives protected from the consequences of their appetites, language used to soften violence, and spiritual life surviving under industrial pressure. Those ideas are already in the games; the official Oddworld history describes Lanning’s original Quintology vision as a series about revolutionaries trying to end the exploitation of cultures, people and the natural world by profiteering capitalists. That is heavy material, but Oddworld’s genius is that it never needed to deliver it as lecture. It delivers it through a frightened little creature saying hello in a horrible factory. It delivers it through jokes about meat snacks. It delivers it through slapstick, chanting, bad bosses, disgusting products and a face you want to protect. (Oddworld)
That is why the McKenna story is the right beginning. A producer from the world of visual media looked at games and did not immediately see the future. Lanning insisted the future was there anyway. Together they built one of the most distinctive game universes of the 1990s, a world so cinematic that it brushed against Oscar consideration almost immediately, then spent decades moving between ambition, disruption, independence, revival and unfinished promise. Now the old answer may need revision. In 1994, the answer was games, not movies. In 2027, if the right partner has the nerve, the answer could be games and movies together, with each finally giving the other what it lacked. The film gives Oddworld scale, audience, retail life, family recognition and renewed confidence. The games give the film depth, history, design authority and a world that was never invented by committee.
So yes, announce the Abe film. Make it animated. Make it dark. Make it funny. Use the old style as the spine and the newer cinematic scale as muscle. Let Lorne carry Abe. Cast real names around him. Give RuptureFarms the awful comic grandeur it deserves. Put it in cinemas if Paramount has the sense to see what is sitting there. Let Netflix have it only if theatrical courage fails and creative risk wins instead. Then build from it: plushies, OddCon, restored classics, the big next game, the full living organism. Oddworld has waited long enough in the half-light of cult memory. A film would not be a sellout of its origins. Done correctly, it would be the thing those origins were quietly pointing toward all along.
Addendum: The Avatar Of It All
One cannot help but notice something quietly bittersweet about watching Avatar become one of the biggest cinematic events in history.
This is not an accusation. James Cameron has spoken openly about the influences behind Avatar—everything from classic science fiction to Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas. There is no evidence that he borrowed directly from Oddworld, nor should anyone claim otherwise.
But audiences who had spent years with Abe could not be blamed for feeling an overwhelming sense of familiarity.
After all, Oddworld arrived first.
Long before Pandora, Lorne Lanning and Sherry McKenna had already built a vast planned five-part saga centred around an indigenous blue-green species whose spiritual connection to the natural world placed them in direct conflict with an immense industrial machine driven entirely by profit. The Mudokons lived in harmony with their environment while corporations consumed everything around them. Their world was filled with sacred creatures, ancient rituals, forgotten temples and landscapes whose beauty stood in deliberate contrast to smoking factories and ruthless executives.
Then, in 2009, the world collectively fell in love with another blue indigenous civilisation fighting another corporate extraction empire in another deeply spiritual ecological fable.
Again, none of this proves influence.
But it certainly illustrates something else.
Ideas do not exist in isolation.
Even some of the visual vocabulary feels strangely adjacent. Both worlds centre on tall, slender blue humanoids with elongated limbs and distinctive head tendrils or ponytails. Both embraced weathered, ancient typography years before the internet jokingly immortalised Avatar‘s use of Papyrus. Both were conceived by veteran visual-effects artists fascinated by believable non-human societies. Both creators—Lorne Lanning and James Cameron—have spent decades speaking about environmental stewardship, corporate excess and humanity’s uneasy relationship with industrial progress.
Perhaps most remarkably, both envisioned enormous long-form sagas. Oddworld was planned as a Quintology. Cameron ultimately committed to five Avatar films. That parallel alone is curious.
Yet one became the highest-grossing film franchise in history.
The other remained one of gaming’s most admired cult creations.
That difference says less about the quality of either work than it does about reach.
Millions of people who embraced Avatar have never met Abe.
Many would probably love Oddworld if they did.
That is one reason I keep returning to the idea of an animated Abe film. Not because Oddworld needs to become Avatar, nor because it should imitate James Cameron’s work, but because it deserves the opportunity to stand in front of a mainstream audience on its own terms.
There is a generation now old enough to have grown up with Abe and young enough to take their own children to the cinema. Imagine those children discovering RuptureFarms for the first time, laughing at the absurdity of the Glukkons before slowly realising the story underneath. Imagine parents explaining that this strange little creature has actually been around since 1997.
Sometimes history is less about who had an idea first than who managed to place it before the largest audience.
Oddworld had remarkable ideas.
Avatar demonstrated that audiences around the world are eager for stories about indigenous cultures, environmental stewardship and resistance to industrial exploitation when those stories are presented with confidence and spectacle.
Perhaps the greatest compliment Avatar inadvertently paid Oddworld was proving that audiences were ready for themes Lorne Lanning had been exploring more than a decade earlier.
Now, perhaps, it is finally Oddworld’s turn to step back into the light.
