Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
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If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal
When you have audacity, nostalgia and guaranteed merchandising potential you don't need the movie to be good, unfortunately.
Holy crap, this is bad. 3% on Rotten Tomatoes...
No, I read the novel, and didn't get that impression at all. (Nor did the novel contain strong barriers to citizenship; it simply portrayed a society which retained the [near universal, in the time and society in which it was written] idea that citizenship required a commitment to service, while reversing the [similarly generally accepted] idea that citizenship was mandatory and automatic with birth.)
And especially I don't think the descriptions equate to simple endorsement after reading lots of Heinlein, where to maintain that shallow attitude toward his work I'd have to think that Heinlein rapidly cycled through deep devotion to a wide range of radically contradictory ideologies. He certainly has certain themes and ideas that he liked to remix that had some relation to his actual political views, but, at least in his fiction, he doesn't seem to be given to simple presentation of what he sees as an ideal.
That might be one of the first times that I learned to enjoy both a movie and a book separately, even if the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book. Now, I actively enjoy things like that, which are faithful in only a few of the dimensions of the original.
The movie was pretty much completely conceived before anyone pointed out a superficial resemblance between certain elements of it and the book, which led to a (sadly, successful) effort to secure rights to the book, Verhoeven reading a small part of the beginning of the book and tossing it in disgust, some light plot and character changes to justify the connection, and then slapping the title of the book onto the movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.
Applying those words to the Resident Evil sequels surely is some form of crime against humanity
I was about to bring this movie up as a counter-example, but I guess the opinions on this are very much split.
As with many other franchises, the follow-ups aren't worth watching.
It's always refreshing to see movie directors make a great movie that has a potential for mediocre sequels, but not give in to that temptation (e.g. Matrix).
Directors pretty much define the quality of the movies, so it's more important to follow them instead of the franchise itself.
Just Cause 2 was the best "shitty action movie" video game I've ever played!
I'm pretty sure it's just because they want to tap into the large existing fanbase of those games.
Or some capability of the new format.
Pulling standalone creative works forward into modernity is interesting. Some of my favorite movies are adapted from plays written before film. The timeline is shorter with video games <> movies, but AAA games are already cinematic and VR is basically here (needs lower hardware cost).
How would your favorite composer have used a synthesizer?
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
It can be good... in the right hands.
We're all debating various complex semantics when the only thing that ultimately really matters is talent... who ultimately is in control of these building blocks. Talent with the director, talent with the screenplay, talent with the acting, etc.
There has been plenty of dumb plots, stories, concepts, etc that have been turned into great movies by talented people. Reservoir Dogs, Clerks 1, Napoleon Dynamite, The Abyss, etc would all sound dumb, boring, or cliche on paper, but were made highly watchable by talented film makers working in their prime.
Just like startups, the only thing that matters is people, not how clever your original idea is. You could have the perfect movie idea, which many big budget have had (which translate well into trailers and per-release marketing), but turn out to be awful once it's turned into the 1.5hr+ long final product.
There is a reason that you see your childhood sold back to you 25 years later when you can be full of nostalgia and introduce your own kids to it fresh.
I agree.
> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works and you can successfully create something new and wonderful when doing so.
> If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good."
The Nation Treasure movies were pretty well received despite being "Indiana Jones without a whip or Nazis". Apart from Indiana Jones being an archeologist tomb raider, the similarities with the Tomb Raider franchise are minimal. The reason the first Tomb Raider movies were so poorly received is because they just bad 90s action movies skinned with Tomb Raider IP, lipstick on a pig.
Looking at the new Tomb Raider movie's trailer, I'm betting it's going to fail as well. It might actually be a decent movie but fans of the game will hate it for rebooting the story and people who don't play video games will avoid it for being a video game movie.
In my opinion, successful adaptations work when they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is a great example. The book itself is a bit dated with 19th century science about vivisection that is preposterous to even the layman today. The premise though is sound and 1996 movie adaptation remains true to it while updating the science and as a result it is a wonderful adaptation.
The the Marvel Cinematic universe has been so successful despite plots that beat a dead horse, you could even argue that they repeat their own plots in subsequent movies. Despite that they're a resounding success because they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it by bringing the action to life in a way that's impossible in comics.
There are plenty of video games that have interesting characters, stories, or even premises that could be adapted into films, I think the main problem is that Hollywood is uninterested in making a good movie, they just looking to cache in on the IP.
> It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
I agree with your sentiment but disagree with your assertion that the innovation must come from the source. The play Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story in 1961 and was adapted into at least 10 films since yet the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet received critical acclaim despite retaining almost all of the dialog from the original play.
> "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason.
Why not? The Harry Potter series seems to have done pretty well for itself despite not really bringing anything really new to the table in terms of story telling or worlds. What makes the series so beloved?
I think there are plenty of video games that could inspire a decent movie. The universe that the Portal and Half-life games exists in has so much potential. I could see a compelling film being made about Barney, Alyx Vance and the City 17 resistance fighters prior to the events of Half-Life 2. Or maybe a story about some aspect of Aperture Science Laboratories as alluded to in Portal 2's various levels.
>All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
(I think it was) David Wong once pointed out about say the trench run in Star Wars: you fly down... and crash. You fly down and shoot the tie fighters and get shot down... You fly down shoot the ties, avoid the turrets and die... fly down and die... fly down shoot the fighters avoid the turrets and Vader kills you... fly down and die... fly down and get hit by the turrets...
Games allow you to fail, a lot, repeatedly and thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie. Books, paintings (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) don't alow you to fail; they can have the same structure as a film. Interactive media IN WHICH YOU CAN FAIL however requires it's own thing.
Most games will allow you to try until you succeed, very few accept failure and progress the story. When they do, people generally do not accept it and retry anyways [1].
> thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie.
I would argues that the much hated quicktime event has been used successfully to give users interaction and have the same flow and tension in a story.
The reality is that most people play through a game in a linear fashion, they may fail but they replay instead of accepting the failure, if that's even an option. Thus to the character and story, there was no failure.
Even still a solid premise can be adapted to either medium successfully. The movie Memento and the video game Braid are fundamentally the same idea presented in radically different ways with very different stories. The impact of the twist at the end of both though is equally poignant.
The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting.
With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle.
Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage...
Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world.
If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it?
Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)
The challenge with this is that a
studio would be alienating fans
Star Was illustrates my point quite nicely: after a couple decades of world building they're already plumbing diminishing returns in one of the worlds largest and most popular IPs only one or two stories removed from their main narrative. I have high hopes for the Han Solo prequel, but Disney isn't putting money behind "alternative" Star Wars narratives until the nostalgia well is tapped, and even then they're going full-court on a trilogy.
Um, Rogue One?
Different stories need different mediums?
It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic.
I really don't understand the appeal of this game.
Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2.
And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.
It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done.
Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
With the caveat that it's a nine year old game at this point.
"Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.
Books like Eric Nylund's Halo: The Fall of Reach, Greg Bear's Forerunner Saga (Halo again), or Brandon Sanderson's Infinity Blade: Awakening are all pretty well-respected and did well in terms of sales. Probably because they manage to avoid falling into the temptation to simply recreate the game experience as a book. They use the game's plot as a starting point to influence the story without dictating it.
Of course, by deviating away from "the game" as fans experienced it, you risk alienating them because the final product doesn't match up with what they expect. And because the same fans are probably the reason why the studio is willing to finance the movie in the first place, I can sort of understand why Hollywood repeatedly tries to hew closely to the source game even though that approach has repeatedly screwed them.
The peculiar thing is that they face a somewhat similar situation when they turn a book into a movie. And yet, Hollywood is more than willing to take risks and deviate away from the source material when necessary. So what about video games in particular scares the studios away from doing the same?
Some games can even continue story telling for hundreds of hours, meandering through dozens of different storylines, arcs, characters, minute details, (Skyrim, Fallout,..). Some games even have their own books inside the games that the character player can read!
The medium really is quite a bit more flexible than a movie. Where I think some comments are suggesting that games are not story rich enough to translate into movies and that's certainly true in some cases, I would argue that the types of story telling are simply not always directly compatible with a linear movie story line.
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
In a video game situation most of these people need to look at the game and build a world that looks like it’s ripped from the game, or the fans get cranky. But once the director does this, isn’t he/she tainted by the source material?
The most successful videogame movies tend towards genre films like Mortal Kombat (the film) and Resident Evil (the series).
Of course, let's not forget that it can be hard to make a good movie, period.
I supposed if Hollywood had some confidence about making video game movies they might be very excited about getting a pre-made trilogy, but since their lack of confidence is well-founded in fact I don't see this happening any time soon.
A Game of Thrones-style "Sigil: City of Doors" series might work. Don't reuse the Nameless One or the plot of the game. Maybe reuse some characters like Annah. Like the game developers did, use the setting and make up new characters and plots.
Maybe before the show airs, put a series of entertaining shorts up on YouTube that introduce the city, the unusual beings resident there, the factions, and finally the main characters of the series.
Any takers?
I think you're right that video games often sacrifice storytelling for gameplay, which I definitely don't mind.
I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.
The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie
I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.
I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.
There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.
I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.
Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.
Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.
And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.
Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.
Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.
If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):
* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion
* Bloody Baron sub-plot
* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion
* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad
* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz
* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory
With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.
I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.
How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.
You can't actually lose Firewatch can you?
I did really enjoy playing it, although I thought it was rather expensive for a game that I finished in about 3 hours.
I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.
Edit: also overwatch has a HUGE lore behind it.
And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.
Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.
But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.
IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.
But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.
I would posit that perhaps the filtration system of making a wide audience film has more impact on how the screenplay is adapted and I haven't noticed that being discussed.
Yes, it's not merely "mostly", it's nearly all.
Except if we talk about some old-style adventure games (and even those aren't any narrative masterpieces either, they barely make it into "adult fiction" level), video games are just some very basic plot skeleton -- as opposed to a plot.
If they have nuance and atmosphere, that's in their visual, audio and interactive elements (as opposed to the plot and narration).
Taking a complete list of every interactive program that qualifies as a video game and saying 99% of them don't have a plot seems similar to saying 99% of books don't have a narrative or plot.
Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I thought the parameter of -games that were intended to actually narrate a story- was heavily implied in this thread.
Same with movies, books, comics, ... but the top is good. The Last Of Us ffs...
Plenty of games have great characters and excellent world-building. Quite a few pose interesting questions, make you face hard dilemmas and leave you pondering long after you're done playing. Several make you immerse yourself in the world and identify with the characters so much that a particular event in their plot will provoke very strong feelings.
But none of those have a plot you can take and make a good movie out of it. Hollywood could very likely pick one of these games and make a great movie based on it, but not by focusing on the plot.
For example, I would be thrilled to watch a movie based on Dragon Age or Fallout. I might like a movie based on Borderlands, perhaps. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy a movie based on The Last of Us or Uncharted or The Talos Principles. And all of those games are among my favorites precisely because I enjoyed their world, characters, themes and choices.
Whether games have great characters is of course subjective, but I have to say that I did not seen them. The best ones tend to be comparable with average book character. (Which is ok, I don't play games for writing, I play them for playing.)
FTR, I had the most fun playing BioShock 2, but I still like Infinite the most.
I would phrase this differently. The interesting parts of the game stories emerge from actions and choices made by the player, not the parts of the story that are actually written. I don't mean that the writers on games aren't doing a good job. Just the opposite, actually: they know how to write the right bits to keep the game interesting, and to help the player work with the game to create interesting stories.
As a friend of adventure games and visual novels I have to disagree. Here are some games that in my opinion have great stories:
- The Longest Journey
- Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward)
- the Blackwell series
- To the Moon
Why would you bother making a plot when you can make bank with Transformer ?
I wouldn't agree with that. Sure, AAA-level blockbuster video games have simplistic, unoriginal and derivative stories and that's what most gamers play unfortunately, but there well-written games are definitely out there.
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 were both better written than any Star Wars movie by a long stretch.
Planescape: Torment is probably the best written game I've ever played, and playing it almost feels like you're reading a novel at times because the world-building and especially the dialogue is so fleshed-out and thoughtful. This game takes a huge dump over the writing in most movies I've seen.
I mean, that's just two examples. I'm a huge sucker for games with a great story regardless of the genre, but genre is a limiting factor in well-written stories.
You generally don't get much of a story in an RTS for example. You are most certainly never going to get a good story from a beat-em up like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.
I mean, it doesn't even succeed at convincing the audience they should root for the Assassins instead of the Templars.
It's like they assumed everyone who was watching who didn't already know the story would be too stupid to understand it.
1. Most games are created as interactive experiences, and the storytelling reflects that. For example, look at something like the Metroid Prime series. Almost all the lore is found in logs and in universe worldbuilding, not in the form of a linear narrative. That's hard to adapt into a non interactive medium, because you have tell such a story in a completely different way.
2. Many successful games either have poorly thought out or non existent stories because they focus on the mechanics and gameplay. See for example the Mario platformers (the RPGs might work better here), the Pokemon series, Sonic, any puzzle game like Tetris, Minecraft etc.
(It's also worth pointing out that much of what's needed for a fun game would be seen as bad writing in any other medium, since a realistic hero likely wouldn't be able to handle the challenges in many games. Most video game protagonists would likely be seen as Mary Sues/wish fulfilment in a non interactive medium).
3. Hollywood has a tendency of going after popular franchises regardless of whether they have a story that works in film form. This means being stuck trying to adapt games that simply don't work well in the format rather than ones like adventure games or visual novels which would adapt pretty well. The recently announced Tetris movie trilogy is a good example of this, since the source material has basically nothing you can adapt into a non interactive film.
Video games are just difficult to adapt by virtue of the medium and what's needed to succeed in it.
I watched it out of a sheer morbid curiosity, and haven't played any Warcraft title newer than II: Tides of Darkness. I thought the movie was crap.
But maybe I and critics just aren't the audience for these movies. Seems most people who saw it liked it. Doesn't that make it at least "Good"?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_g...
They would just name drop locations and people, expecting you to know what they were. It was just mostly a fan service, "here is your movie, loyal fans!" types.
It still wasn't "great" even if you were a fan, but I can't imagine how bad a lot of it would have come off as if you didn't follow things pretty closely to begin with.
I've only got pop culture knowledge of World Of Warcraft, and the way they explained most parts of the movie was really hard to follow. They needed:
- More world-building, geography was hard to follow, jumping around too much.
- Better character introduction, characters would just appear, banking on fans recognising them.
- Less assumed knowledge...
The whole movie came off a bit amateurish in how the story was told...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/02/warcraft-fi...
I'd suggest it was the exception to the rule. Sure, it's not Oscar material, but it was a thoroughly well made movie - and the ratings support this.
I'm a fan of the Warcraft lore (though not where WoW took it). I found it pretty awful too. It seemed to lack a story - "stuff" just seemed to happen. It was like a 6-year old telling a story: there was no coherence or continuity. I've liked tons of movies that have done poorly with critics but a common theme across all of them is that they had a storyline.
To put this in perspective, I enjoyed Doom (2005) which is renowned for being one of the worst game movies around.
I played WoW for years starting with US open beta (I'm from the EU) But the movie was just childish and simple. I'm starting to think that I moved on from simple plots to some more interesting things. Like Asimov instead of Star Wars...
I absolutely loved the concept of the "Jimmy" character, it made the entire movie super satisfying. The topic of surrogate bodies, whether virtual, robotic, or in this case biologic, is very interesting to me.
"Edge of Tomorrow" is a fantastic video game movie in spirit. The Groundhog-Day-Formula is not new, but it nails the game experience of having a "savepoint" and getting better and better until you master the bullet hell level.
I would love to see a Bioshock movie done right, or honestly a proper Metal Gear film. But if the filmmakers don't relate to the material or see it as more than just another narrative engine, we'll get the dime-a-dozen action flicks that try to hype up a few moments without capturing what makes so many VG experiences special.
They're working on that (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, guy who did Kong: Skull Island). I have no idea how you could possibly turn Metal Gear into a movie that is appealing to people who haven't played the games, but he seems to be a huge fan of the series, and has claimed to have "cracked the code" about how to make an appealing movie based on a video game, in the same way that Hollywood has cracked the code for making comic book movies. He's also working with Hideo Kojima. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Alternatively, they could go The Shining/2001: A Space Odyssey route and just make a very good film that doesn't resemble the original work very much. But Vogt-Roberts is not the Kubrick for that, nor does he seem like the type to piss off original authors.
[1] http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/BioShock:_Rapture_(Novel)
Also, Mortal Kombat (1995) is a good film.
> Many are "so bad it's good" such as
> anything Uwe Boll makes[...]
Maybe it's best just to listen to the soundtrack instead.
The overt sexism (and threats) towards Sonya are pretty upsetting. I'd forgotten about that, and as a teenager I wrote it off as "well I guess he's just a Bad Guy". As an adult (and parent) now, I really feel like that kind of messaging is pretty toxic and unnecessary. (Heck, just the revenge motive of he-killed-her-partner would have been enough.)
There's a lot of writing that on some levels are Bad -- low-dimensional characters, etc -- but in the context of a movie character, wasn't all that bad. The characters were in many ways as much a caricature as their video game characters were. Johnny Cage is such a caricature of what one would imagine as the intersection of a spoiled (80s or 90s?) Movie Star with a martial artist -- in many ways, he seemed a direct spoof of Van Damme or other actors. And yet, I liked that they gave his character some redeeming qualities (IIRC).
As an action film, I still enjoyed the fight choreography for most of the fights, even if you have to have some huge suspension of disbelief about things like who would want to be one of Shang Tsung's disposable minions. :) I mean, what's the benefits and compensation package for that look like?
To this day the fight with Reptile is one of my favorite action sequences in any film I've seen.
For another example, see Final Fantasy: Advent Children which is a sequel to Final Fantasy 7. It's pretty enjoyable.
And to be fair, most films based on other media don't directly translate their source material either. Oh sure, novel based films do, but most comic book movies seem to have plots written specifically for the movie, with elements from various comic issues mixed in. And most based on TV series usually have new stories too.
Another good example is the Phoenix Wright movie (in Japan). Both are excellent love letters to their fans.
A movie glances over many details and doesn't leave much to the imagination of the viewer.
Movies and books are both scripted stories. Video games involve choices by the player which can't be done in movie medium. I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, which are an exception to that medium being scripted.
Hollywood makes them the same reason why there are WordPress or Salesforce plugins: a proven market of people with interest and willing to spend money.
They're fundamentally different, and as long as the creators and the audience are on board with that fact you can absolutely make quality movie adaptations from books as long as you play to the strengths of the medium.
You can't make a movie with as much depth and breadth as a book. You can't cram as much exploration and detail in and hope it'll come out even halfway decent. What you can do however is show beautiful and breathtaking imagery, and offer action and thrill-rides the likes of which you can't hope to match with the written word.
Reading Lord of the Rings makes me appreciate just how special it is that Legolas and Gimli become friends, because there's more room to explain the relationship between dwarves and elves. I get to feel what Frodo feels when he leaves his home behind.
But when I saw Rivendell or the Mines of Moria for the first time in the movies it overshadowed what the books had told me about those places. And I still to this day get goosebumps whenever I see the charge of the Rohirrim. Something I never experienced in the books.
Is one set of experiences better than the other? Or are they just different.
It's just that it was about a video game that didn't exist at the time the film was made; the Tron video game
> is based on an early draft of the film's script [1]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(video_game)#Differences_...
EDIT: convert HTML tags to markdown-compatible glyphs.
But given my take of the flick I almost didn’t go as I thought “eh, game movie”.
If I were making a movie about that subject (and maybe this will make it clear why I'm not a producer), I'd go for more of an "Adaptation" style film. Viewers can't control time? Play it up, by (visually) admitting that the game powers like "rewind" are done on film through multiple takes, and stunt men, and editing. That's how you translate game to film, and this game mechanic provides the perfect opportunity.
So you've got a normal action film for the first X minutes, and then there's a fight scene, and Jake trips and flubs it, and we hear someone call "cut!", and you see everything freezes while the crew rush in to reset everything to 10 seconds earlier, and they run it again. The first time this happens, it's super quick, so the audience is left wondering if they really saw it or not. As the film goes on, it happens more often, and more extensively. Maybe sometimes the actor tries several times and then gives up and runs off stage, and a stunt man runs in. Maybe sometimes you expand and see that the whole thing is happening on an editing workstation, and they move clips around to make it look like everything worked, and then they hit "play" and you're back in the story.
Then at the very end, it zooms out to show the filmmakers watching what we just saw, and they say "Nah, nobody would ever believe that it all just worked out perfectly the first time like this". Fin.
If the whole point of PoP:SoT is the protagonist's ability to control time, film already has a way to do that. Don't try to just embed an old mechanic in the new medium. That's like building an interpreter for C, and calling it a day. You've got a native JMP here, so use it.
Great humor potential, though it'd get stale and instead become the story.
For example, I can't stand musicals, because I think characters breaking out into song and dance every 5 minutes destroys any attempt at immersiveness or believability. But lots of people love them, and don't find this incongruity problematic. So I don't think breaking from the flow of the main story necessarily breaks the story.
Did the structure of "Adaptation" detract from its 'immersiveness'? I'd say it's the wrong question to ask.
My purpose was not humor, but to pull back the curtain and show the absurdity inherent in all action movies, and the work involved. Satire can be humorous, but that's not really the goal. I'd still love watching Jackie Chan outtakes even if his movies weren't comedic.
I have no use for yet another (whitewashed) action movie. Then again, as I said, there's probably a reason I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker.
I know a bunch of folks who walked out feeling cheated or confused.
I think most of the issue is that people want a) a story b) to be entertained and c) to forget about the outside world for a bit.
Anything that fills these boxes is good for mass consumption (from Hollywood producer/ purely dollars point of view). Enlightening the subject or shocking them with with new points of view are entirely stretch goals.
It was an incredibly fun watch.
At the other end of the spectrum you have something like "Blade Runner 2049", which was a great movie with a large budget, but it basically bombed at the box office. It's easy to see why studios are hesitant to take risks with projects like that.
Video games get away with a lot less plot and character development because of their interactive nature and because they are graded on a curve. Many classic games have basically no character development at all.
People think adapting a game into a movie should be a natural transition but it isn’t at all. They are totally different forms.
The "Doom" movie is arguably an excellent adaptation of the video game. But that doesn't make for much of a movie.
2) See the part about grading games on a curve.
Could be worse, you could be adopting classic boardgames. The Battleship movie was gloriously dumb. Monopoly would come across as a critique of capitalism. Actually, the Clue movie was a lot of fun.
I also thought the WarCraft movie was very good, but there I did grow up playing the hell out of WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, and reading and re-reading the manual with the backstory covered by the movie (not to mention the lovely concept art). Bit of a shame that it didn't do quite well enough to continue the story.
Also the first person part at the end was unnecessary and just wasn't good cinema (compare to Hard Core Henry which was 1st person but it worked because they really committed to it).
Short answer, because they have hard dates, and games are usually on Valve time [1].
Forcing creativity and creating fun usually ends badly, the creativity and fun come through research, prototyping and play testing.
Creativity like John Cleese said is an open mode, but you have to be in closed mode to ship [2]. Forced hard dates lead to more closed mode than open mode and the creativity and fun are compressed to times where it just doesn't work out right.
> We've become fascinated by the fact that we can usually describe the way in which people function at work in terms of two modes: open and closed.
> So what i can just add now is that creativity is not possible in the closed mode.
Sometimes games for events or product releases like movies can be good, usually it is because most of the fun and systems are from existing, already successful games or formulas. So the other problem movie games run into is they are usually just a re-skinning, but those are usually more fun and better built for fun and performance.
[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
[2] https://genius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativity-annotat...
* Super Mario Bros * Silent Hill
And then realized that I couldn't add more to it... It's insane. There are so many good stories in video game. I'd argue that The Last Of Us is the most beautiful entertainment story every created be it a movie, video game, comic, book, ...
Anime have the same issues, they have insane stories and they either end up being ignored or worse, being shit on by directors. See Dragon Ball Evolution or Netflix Death Note...
On screen today we have shows like Game of Thrones that really deliver at making us feel things and keeping us surprised. Before there was Game of Thrones though I reckon that the death of Aerith Gainsborough in Final Fantasy 7 was one of those twists that TV shows and movies shied away from until recently.
I know, I know, it's the other way around. But it should be proof that a good videogame movie is at least possible - you would have to change surprisingly little.
Even reading the production retrospectives is hilarious. And the fact that Dennis Hopper is in the movie is priceless.
They even made an actual arcade game for the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvErIWbwZI
And the way it shows other characters, especially Q-Bert and Zangief, was hilarious.
On the topic, I do believe that there are worthy stories in video games that can be translated to the screen not just for those who don't play games, but also for gamers who want to relive some of the story without the tedious bits in between (like farming for XP or upgrading).
The new tomb raider was probably the closest so far. I liked the tie-ins with the game and the actress did a great job of bringing the game character to life. The few things I didn't like were some of the acting and one-dimensional supporting characters. Also some scenes were just contrived, but I suppose that creeps in according to budget and timing.
This is only true for a limited subsection of games. (granted, this subsection of games is pretty much exclusively the source of Video Game Movies).
There are many games where mechanics are just a delivery mechanism for the art, story and overall experience.
Human beings do respond to rewards and payoffs; it can be the satisfying sound of a coin being collected or animation of your character wall-jumping and grabbing onto a ledge. These things DO matter.
Take Dark Souls for example. The game's story and mythology are blended with the game world, hidden in little details and item descriptions. If you take its bits and pieces and assemble them linearly, it's nothing special, it could never serve as the plot for a good movie. However, if you experience it properly, by being immersed in the game world, it gets way better.
Having read Ready Player One and then seeing the movie, it's like they didn't even try to capture what made the book successful. The book had clues that were hard for the characters to figure out, but in the movie, it was basically trivial for them.
They should have done 3 movies, each one focusing on obtaining a single key and opening its respective gate. It would have left plenty of room for character development and the underlying love story that are in the book. They could have been Netflix movies too.
It might work on an alternative platform like Netflix, but not out of the studio system.
My opinion is stop making super hero movies and video game movies. They may be somewhat fun, but they provide no sustenance, it's like eating Ramen.
Make some movies from the DragonLance books. There are some fantasy stereotypes in there, but the stories are awesome overall.
Take the recent Tomb Raider movie, after I've seen the trailer I had no desire at all to go watch it. Why would I watch something that I've experienced for over 20 hours in depth and on my own pace already. I don't know, maybe a lot of people got excited when they saw her with the plane: "Hey, look, it's exactly like the game!" For me it was just boring.
Instead focus on a character that isn't the main one in video games, use the setting etc. F.e. as a Dark Souls fan I would love for a movie to add some backstory for Solaire. Scrap any stupid references to the game like putting a white sign on the ground to summon somebody, instead just let Solaire meet another traveller (at a bonfire ;D) or anybody dying and then respawning. There you have it: (A already beloved character, ) a man of faith looking for divinity (or whatever) while travelling to faraway lands (supernatural or not) is confronted with the unbearable evils of this world to have a crisis of faith which he either overcomes or goes mad over.
There's definitely a way to create a highly-compelling side story that "fulfills" the promise of an original series without being overly constrained by it. For example, Tell Tale Studios is a game company that is quite famous for making good side stories that latch onto existing franchises, and their Walking Dead video game is one of the best video game storylines I've ever played through. It seems like it's quite possible to turn good movies and good tv shows into compelling video games; surely this is possible in reverse as well! It's also really easy for me to imagine an alternate universe where video game adaptations are like comic-book or novel adaptations, which are capable of performing quite well.
I do think that making good movies that are entertaining and have artistic merit is always hard, and since the problem of making good movies is already not easy, adding additional constraints from a video game premise probably makes it more difficult, especially since film types are probably more likely to be passionate lovers of comics and books than they are to be passionate gamers. There's probably also a problem with the prestige of video game titles that makes it difficult to find good writing talent.
Maybe if someone makes a movie based on Zork - basically 3 hours of Star Wars "crawl"?
Zork Nemesis movie trailer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims#Film
Film
A live action drama film based upon The Sims was announced in 2007. [15] On May 25, 2007, it was announced that The Sims film rights had been purchased by 20th Century Fox. [16] It was to be written by Brian Lynch and produced by John Davis. [17] [18]
[15] "The Sims Coming to the Big Screen". ComingSoon. May 25, 2007. Retrieved October 31, 2007. http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/20635-the-sims-coming-...
[16] ""The Sims" to move from PC screen to silver screen". Reuters. May 28, 2007. Retrieved October 31, 2007. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-electronicarts-thesims/th...
[17] "Producer John Davis Gives Updates on THE SIMS Movie, the Aliens vs. Predator Movies and Jason and the Argonauts! | Collider". 2008-09-21. Retrieved 2016-08-09. http://collider.com/producer-john-davis-gives-updates-on-the...
[18] "The Sims movie planned". Retrieved 2016-08-09. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-sims-movie-planned/110...
I know it was a commercial disaster, but Final Fantasy is the closest we've come IMO. The series has a great aesthetic and style that doesn't feel too derivative of anything else, and it's known for having great plots and characters (by video game standards). If anything, they strayed too far from the source. Make it about a group of adventurers in a weird cyberpunk/fantasy universe with outrageous haircuts fighting an insane demigod and I think it can work. Obviously that works in the games.
What you have to do is take games that have strong styles already and adapt the feeling and personality, not the mechanics.
Some things just shouldn't be live-action movies. Look at all the anime movie failures. They were perfectly fine in their original animated format. No need for live action, except to keep people in the movie industry employed.
Games are not films for a reason, usually because the interactivity is tightly interwoven with the story, otherwise the artists would’ve picked a different medium.
Take away the game elements and you may have something that has a high percentage of not translating well.
If it was meant to be a movie, it would’ve been one to start. If that’s not the case, it’s an exception to the rule.
NiGHTS Into Dreams...(Saturn) is a fantastic game that IMO would make a shitty movie I dare say even if Miyazaki himself gave it a shot.
e.g: street fighter? mario bros? dragonball evolution? death note? ghost in the shell?
You need to be extremely creative to ruin those.
The reverse has also been true: bad game adaptations from good movies. e.g: ET, back to the future, etc.
1. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2010)
2. Resident Evil (2002)
3. Doom (2005)
4. Mortal Kombat (1995)
5. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2003)
It seems that every corner in this medium has been covered and faded it shine(?)
I'm afraid that knowing this, they seeked to explore new grounds like games and comics books, nevermind that it basically the same story but utilizing the special effects to attract young audience.
So i think it's not just video game movies, imo it's the whole medium struggling to stay relevant.
knowing this, i keep my eyes on the black and white movies. they don't try to impress, they're simple and easy to follow and the actors are really great.
one of my favorites is Buster keaton, the greatest stuntman ever imo.
But given that, it seems it can go the other way as well. I saw Ready Player One (and have read the book) and the differences between the book and the movie, while understandable, interfered with me enjoying the movie.
There are also fairly formulaic movies that unroll just like a video game. With early levels, a mini boss, more levels, another boss, a few more levels and then the big boss. Watching Kong skull island was like that.
Negotiating split and who puts money upfront would be a nightmare.
For example, Ready Player One focused on movies in large part because Spielberg really loves movies. You can tell they move him, whereas the video game parts are largely gags.
The cutscenes in WC3 worked because they were paced well (Due to gameplay in between them), and each one established a few basic facts about the world, or one of its characters. If you were to sit and watch through all the cutscenes back-to-back, they would not hold up well.
The film sucked for the same reason that Lord of the Rings would have sucked as a two hour movie. It would just be a dumb, disjointed montage of action and scenery.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0098663/
So, maybe 30 years?
Halo would have made a great movie but MS messed that one up and the guy they hired went on to make District 9.
There are plenty of games worthy of movie treatments. Dark Souls, SkyRim, Zelda, Mass Effect, Ico, Last Guardian, just to name a few.
If you start with Rampage or Mortal Kombat than you end up with equally shallow movies. There just isn't enough 'story' to make it worthwhile.
Indeed. Ten years ago, Microsoft could have just taking the existing plot of Halo-1 (Combat Evolved) and turned it into a movie. They could have just cast Steve Downes, Jen Taylor and the other voice actors to play their own roles. And just use the original musical score too. They would have had audiences jumping to their feet and cheering.
I'm not saying it would have been easy, making a truly great movie (or at least a truly great action movie) is never easy, but it would have been straightforward and easily successful.
For anyone interested, the script was leaked at some point. You can read it here (I have not yet): http://www.spumonte.com/files/pdfs/Halo%20Movie%20Script%20-...
The we are ODST video is probably the best example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjamhIPVvnI
I think movies would do better converted to games like Golden Eye. I would love to check out Gone in 60 Seconds as a game, similar to GTA.
Lots of games tell stories these days. There's no fundamental reason those stories couldn't be adopted to the silver screen. Of course many of these stories aren't really very good, but the same can also be said of any medium. There are elements that might not translate, but that's true of any adaptation. For instance Bioshock's infamous "Would you kindly" plot point won't come though the same way in a movie.
A movie needs a couple hours of focused plot, and a limited number of in-depth characters whose motivations can reasonably be covered in this short time. A blockbuster game generally involves a much larger cast of characters, and a much, much longer/wider plot story to cover the hours.
If you leave the story as-is and just cut the "sidequests", then the movie will be full of characters who are barely introduced and whose motivations make no sense to those who haven't played the game and don't know the backstory; and if you cut the story to be "movie-sized", then it will have little resemblance to the original, as key points will need to be drastically altered.
FFVII: Advent Children is a great example of this. Half the characters from the original game just come stumbling into the plot with no introduction or explanation.
And books often are even harder to translate the story aspects for because they usually take place over much longer time spans than movies or video games. Many movies made from books seem to have character relationships that seem like they should have taken much longer to develop because of it.
what I think is that they tried so far to adapt games with a protagonist, which just fall flats when you are not in control. a war movie inspired to some strategy franchise where they set up the scene to the game events would fare much much better because the audience would already care about the world as opposed as to a single non interactive character.
Good movies push people. They bring intense experience to the table. Insight. Important things. Videogames literally avoid all of those like the plague. Out of an infantile fear of government-led censorship that has been proven wrong over and over and over since the 1980s, gamers defend a system of far-more-perniscious censorship by private companies. And so they get what they have worked so hard for. Milquetoast garbage in terms of emotional content in games.