Video games and movies have a very strange co-existence. I would use the word “relationship,” but that would imply there is some functionality between the two. And if you’re asking me, I believe that there honestly isn’t.
Unless the type of relationship we’re dealing with are the kind that end up on Jerry Springer, except the difference is there’s some entertainment when that goes down. When movies and video games hook up, it’s usually anything but entertaining.
Every now and then, a video game becomes popular and some Hollywood big shot gets money signs in his eyes and decides to make the movie adaption. And who can blame them? The Halo movie has been a prominent topic amongst Halo fans despite being in production hiatus. That kind of attention is hard to resist getting their filthy Hollywood hands on, because the hype in itself will be enough to sell the movie.
But there’s the problem. Studios never lose enough money to discourage them, so the producers of these game-based movies don’t do as great a job as they could.
The movie producers have this mentality that fans of the games will go see it no matter what, so they only buy the rights to very little key points of the game’s actual storyline.
The “Doom” movie, for example, was about marines fighting zombie aliens on Mars, when the original video game was about a portal to Hell being opened up on Mars.
There’s a pretty big difference between the two concepts and it outraged fans that that change was made.
However, just the “Doom” brand name and basic marketing helped the movie gross in way over the movie’s budget of $60 million, according to IMDB.
What happens with game-based movies are the producers assume we, as gamers, are just playing for the explosions and shooting and sword slashing.
While I’d lie if that isn’t a fun part of it, I feel that video games are much more prominent as a new story-telling medium.
I get into the characters and the settings and the conflict that ensues. When I see a game-based movie, it seems like they remove those elements but up-scale the explosions and shooting.
It is insulting because when non-gamers look at these movies, they think “Oh, this is all those video games are?” which just furthers people’s misguided beliefs in games being some cause of violence in real-world society. I’ve written about this issue before and am prepared to prove them wrong again, if I have to.
When it comes to game-based movies, there’s a list of things I’d rather the game’s makers do other than going to Hollywood with it.
1) We don’t need some two-hour blockbuster. A 15 to 30 minute short-film viewable via the Internet is all that’s necessary to tell a good story set in the game’s universe.
Plus, we avoid having terrible Hollywood actors involved.
2) They need to write a new story. We don’t need to see the film version of the story we’ve played many times. Make the movie the prequel, or from a completely different character’s perspective.
Making a game into a movie isn’t like making a book into a movie. Hearing an awesome line from a book being said in the movie adaption is a great feeling, but it’s meaningless when I already knew how that awesome line sounds being spoken just from playing the game.
Perfect examples of game-based films that followed the above two tips are “Halo: Landfall” and “Assassin’s Creed: Lineage.” However, one last tip is:
3) Don’t do it. If they ignore the above two, it’s just going to disappoint their fans.
Even if they did follow the first two tips, I’d still rather see the new story as downloadable content, or a sequel.
I love movies, sure, but I am a gamer through and through.