One of the most regular pieces of news that seems to crop up is some game being given a movie deal by some studio. We saw this just yesterday, with a collaboration between J.J. Abrams and Valve announced that could point to a Portal or Half-life movie being made, with a collaboration between the filmmaker and the developer a powerful one.
In many ways I suppose this is a reflection of just how far gaming has come since the days it was pushed to the side and almost entirely ostracised by society. The situation now is hardly amazing, we still get politicians and the media rallying against violent games and linking them to just about every piece of real world violence, but there’s certainly a more broad acceptance of gaming as a whole, even if certain elements are still left out in the cold.
[drop2]You could also see it as Hollywood complimenting the writing in games, that their characters and stories are good enough to be seen on the silver screen as well as in your home.Of course, given the number of changes that movies often make to the games they’re based on, perhaps it’s not the writing as a whole that’s improved but simply the core ideas.
What’s really improved though is one simple thing, brand recognition. Games now make enough money that they’re impossible for movie makers to ignore, they frequently make the box office take look pathetic by comparison.
There is, of course, the huge gap in price between a ticket to the cinema and a brand new game (although with the rising price of tickets the gap’s closing), but there’s still an absolutely huge market for games and their characters that movie studios want to tap into.
I can’t really blame them for that, every business on the planet wants to get more customers to buy their product. However, at times it really does feel like the cross-media proliferation of games has gone just a little bit too far.
The concept of characters from a game popping up somewhere else is certainly nothing new, Saturday Supercade started in 1983 and featured short episodes featuring characters from arcade games (Donkey Kong, Frogger, Q*Bert and Pitfall Harry), while the late 80s and early 90s saw Mario and Sonic, among others, getting their own cartoons and comic books.
Kids loved the characters, and making transition to other forms of media was an obvious one that provided profit for everyone involved.
As gaming has grown so has the desire for their characters to make the transition over to comics, books, TV and films. It now seems like just about any popular piece of IP will be picked up for a film, and I wonder if this isn’t always the best thing for the original games.
Yeah, the Super Mario Bros. movie.
It may well be that these crossovers bolster the original game, bringing the characters to a wider audience and, crucially, drawing in more money for the publishers and developers to make more games with. However, too often I think they’re simply bad, harming the game’s reputation and enforcing a notion that games can’t tell “proper” stories.
If a movie’s good then, maybe, you might be able to redirect some of those patrons back towards the source material, although the popularity of movies like the Avengers or Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy hasn’t done all that much to bolster the sales of comics featuring the same characters.
Of course much of the time the announcements of a movie deal comes to nothing, it’s simply a studio buying up the rights on the chance that they feel like making it and to stop a rival from picking up a potential blockbuster. I’m actually content with this, and hopefully a longer time spent developing the film will lead to a better quality product if it does get released.
Realistically that’s what we need if games are going to continue to get movie deals – good films of good games. If that starts to happen more often then perhaps it could be good for gaming as a whole, although I do worry that an oversaturation may seem a little desperate, similar to some of the backlash against the number of movies tied into comics.
The Lone Steven
Most video game films tend to be average to god awful. We do get the rare decent film, for example, the first 2 resi films were decent, then it went downhill. The latest one is said to be very crap. If a video game film is directed by Uwe Boll, it’s dead as it’s Uwe Boll.
But most of the time, the source is not suitable for a film. In fact, i can’t think of any video game films that is based on a franchise that’s known for it’s deep plot. If MGS was made into a film, it would just be cutscenes from the games. Okay, joking aside, it would be an excellent film if done correctly.
What video game films require is a team of excellent writers, the founder of the series, help from the development studio(the script writers) to make the changes if required and a restraining order against Boll, Bay, Anderson, and other directors that have produced shit video game films. Can’t believe Resident Evil has gone from a decent video game film to one that makes no sense and gets worse with every film(from two onwards)
xdarkmagician
Like everything it boils down to money. Take Resident Evil: Retribution. It had a $65 million budget. Now most people dont know this but about 50% of box office movie earning go to the theaters, so in order for RE to make money it needs to clear double, or in this case $130 million. Now RE Afterlife made roughly $300 million, the highest to date, with a $60 million budget. Now its time for the business, if you made $100 million from the last film, thats your target for the next film, maybe a little more. Youre not going to go out and spend $200 million on a RE movie because the franchise has already showed a RE movie won’t make $400 million. With a $65 million budget youre limited with what you can do, you cant hire a $20 million director or actor, and you can’t have $64 million in special effects, you need to balance everything, or do the best with what you got. You simply cant afford to make a RE movie as good as The Avengers movie., a movie with a $220 million budget. In short most video game require too much of an investment to get a “proper” movie that will appease the rabbid fanbase. In order for video game movies to get better they’ll need to start making more at the box office.
eye8have9you3
For me the main problem with conversions between various mediums is plot length. Films go on for between 1.5 and 2.5 hours, video games go for upwards of ten hours and books often way more. When you make a game of a film, you always need to add more detail in to make it last , when you make a film out of a book you need to cut it way down, simplifying characters motives and plots, often changing everything so only the most basic plot points remain. Sometimes these work like spiderman 2 or the godfather, but they’re very different from the original source. Anyway the same problem would happen with games to films, all decent game plots are way too long. How on earth would you fit in the plot of assasins creed into a film? There’s no way you could include the templars, abstergo, ezio and the animus into a film, but take away any of those elements and the whole thing would fall apart.
salvodaze
While we’re at it, why not give JJ our house keys and PIN codes so he can own our lives faster. I find his work lacking that element of “genius”, that spark. While I haven’t seen most of it, I immediately LOST interest in LOST because of the mainstream ways of that show. And I believe Revolution already spoke for itself. I honestly don’t care for any show that doesn’t have great characters and character development no matter how crazy exciting the fiction elements. That’s what set apart great shows like BTVS or Torchwood. I just see no creative genius in this guy to make anything that will stand out to me as exceptional. So here’s to hoping he doesn’t get to do Portal.
Roynaldo
Mortal Kombat was awesome! That’s all I have to say.