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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

What are the reasons why Hollywood hasn’t yet mined the old Lucasarts games for movie ideas? They seem such natural source material.

Are there IP ownership complications?

Are the games themselves too derivative of movies (e.g. Monkey Island being inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and thus reverse-retrospectively derivative of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)?

Would it be too hard to adapt them as comedies, or would they be too boring as non-comedies?

Is the built-in audience actually not as large as I imagine it would be?

Are there some gaming-ignorant egos involved? i.e. what lead to the 4th Indiana Jones using the lame Crystal Skull story instead of the great Fate of Atlantis story?

Is the world simply not ready for Day of the Tentacle on Disney+?

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> i.e. what lead to the 4th Indiana Jones using the lame Crystal Skull story instead of the great Fate of Atlantis story?

This is a great example. I would love to know if this, specifically, has even been discussed.

Apparently Lucas Arts was part of the sale of Lucas Film to Disney.

https://screenrant.com/lucasfilm-movie-plan-lucasarts-advent...

Didn’t Spielberg work on The Dig with Lucasarts? Now that you mention it, it does seem weird they’ve never made that into a movie.

The story at the time (true or not, who knows) was that the dig was meant to be a film but was too expensive to make so it became a game instead.

The Dig was derived from a story idea for a TV episode that Spielberg was involved in (supposedly Amazing Stories). But that wasn't filmed, so the idea got finally handed down to Lucas Arts.

The scuttlebutt is that Disney executives simply don't know what LucasArts IP they bought when they bought Lucasfilm and it will likely take new blood at the executive level with some bit of videogame literacy.

Some of that might also be complicated by existing licensing contracts. For instance, it's not clear from the outside how much Double Fine (and thus Microsoft) owns now of the games they managed to remake (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango). Maybe Microsoft has the movie rights now? That would be funny, though Microsoft's attempts at movies to date have all been cursed.

That's a good question. Maybe the screenwriter doesn't want to share royalties? Although Disney doesn't seem to care too much about that: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/16/22166064/star-wars-alien-...

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