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Subjective
Video Game Movies Suck
Metacritic's best video game film adaptions of the decade, OF THE DECADE!
Hollywood doesn't make good video game movies for the same reason General Motors doesn't make motorized unicycles: they're stupid ideas, there's very little money in it and it they aren't very good at making their regular product to begin with. They're not adapting the license to tell the epic story on the cinematic field of wonder—they're doing it because they are literally out of ideas.

"Didn't you just greenlight another movie based on a video game?"

For whatever reason, video games and movies don't play well together. Every so often, someone with dollar signs in their eyes will try to make a movie based on a video game franchise, only to run into this unscalable wall: Video Game Movies Suck.

It's kind of hard to say why. Some would say that video games are essentially just movies that have showmanship sacrificed in favor of control, so sacrificing the control leaves you with a bad movie. Others would say that video game plots are just bad, existing just to give the player an excuse to go out and fight things.

The reality? Well, it tends to vary — Platformers tend to not have enough plot within the games themselves (maybe a three-paragraph setup in the manual and a two-minute ending), so the writers need to improvise, resulting in either Adaptation Decay or Pragmatic Adaptation — and so far, it's usually the former. Fighting Games tend to have a different, but flimsy plot and endings depending on the player's character, and the writers have to mishmash these various plot threads into a coherent whole. The only video game genres that pay much attention to plot — RPGs and Adventure games — tend to have far too much plot to squeeze into a two-hour flick without leaving a ton out.

Add to that the facts that too many plot changes risk alienating the carryover demographic, and that what plot less cerebral games do have tends to be on the level of, well, to quote the Doom comic:

"DYNAMITE! I'm cooking with gas! I've gotta handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah, that's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man! I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!"

So far, no one's nominating video game movies for Oscars. If you hear new, exciting rumors about an upcoming film (like the rumored John Woo-directed Metroid movie), tread carefully, or you may be crushed beneath the Descending Ceiling of bad writing.

Often (although less universally) the reverse is true, of course, which is The Problem With Licensed Games.

For some reason, Dating Sim movies seem exempt from this trope, although as with anything, there are exceptions.

Note that all these entries are pretty subjective. If you object to one, you should probably mention it on the discussion page.

See also Uwe Boll, but please don't see any of his movies. For your own sake.


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Trading Card LameMedia Adaptation Tropes        
They Copied It So It SucksIt Sucks        
Video Game Cruelty PotentialVideo Game CultureUwe Boll
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