Video game Movie Thread

Hi everyone, I make this thread to talk about videogames adaptation as a whole since hollywood still tries(now with a few degrees of sucess) of bring videogames to the big screen with titles like warcraft and assasin creed.

So I will start with two questions:

What videogame do you think will be next?

And

Why adapting video games is so hard? at least comparing with adapting a book or a comic book.

I think part of the problem is that video game movies will, inevitably, be seen as 'video game movies'. There have been no great successes, neither critically nor commercially, to grant any legitimacy to the idea. Video games themselves don't really command the same mainstream respect as books, either. So video game movies can take a franchise's name and use that to grab some recognition from certain sectors, but there's not much incentive to create a unique work under that name, nor to try to distill the thematic elements of the original work in a creative way.

Video game movies have, of course, also received the opposite. I don't know how much the general public really knows about Uwe Boll, but in any case it doesn't help. Existing video game movies are considered infamously bad, and are now expected to be so right out the gate. Boll's works specifically obviously have their own backstories, backstories of German tax laws and a directing style best summed up as 'bizarre'.

I also think a lot of video games also have narratives that are simply, by the standards of other media, weak. Games have tried to improve their narratives in recent times, or at least they've put more focus on them, but they're fundamentally based around player agency (which can make stories come across as self-serving when you replace the player with an observer) and gameplay-oriented challenges/experiences. Directly adaptating scenes from books can already lead to awkwardness; scenes directly adaptated from games fare even worse. The more narrative-centric games, meanwhile, often simply don't really need or benefit from a translation to film.

I don't think all video game movies are inherently doomed to failure, but these are things you'd have to tackle when taking the source material.

edited 8th Jan '18 4:11:41 PM by Lavaeolus

Well toys are starting to make great movies ala The Lego Movie, so I can see video game movies being close to that level. You just need the right writers.

edited 8th Jan '18 5:09:10 PM by 123tbones

It's amazing how uniformly terrible all movies made from video games have been. You'd think someone would make a good one by accident.

What's with all this negativity when Mortal Kombat is right there and was a great success? Decent acting, fun dialogue, amazing music, cool fight scenes.

And Resident Evil was also quite successful.

It's not True Art (TM) but they made bank. Japan especially loved the RE movies but Japan loves all things RE. Also the actress who played Jill took everything super seriously, it's kinda cute if you watch the commentary for Apocalypse and Milla (Alice) and Oded (Carlos) having a blast about how silly it all is but then there's Ms. Guillory (Jill) talking about how she memorized the way Jill even walks in RE 3: Nemesis so she could accurately depict the character.

Also just checking on MK's box ofice sales, I totally forgot about Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Big A-grade star in Angelina Jolie and it made great money.

Also who will ever forget the awesome RE Theme done by Marilyn Manson, a pretty big time musician at the time?

Really, the soundtracks alone justify each RE movie's existence for me.

edited 8th Jan '18 7:16:10 PM by Nikkolas

Mortal Kombat is generally considered the best video game film because it's a enjoyable fantasy martial arts film, a reasonably faithful adaptation, and gets the appeal of the games down the pat. Not to mention it was influential enough to whiplash back into the games with things like the characterization of Raiden.

The film is, of course, a Hamtastic extravaganza of cheesy lines, martial arts and corny CGI, but this descriptor also directly applies to most Mortal Kombat games down to a tee.

Where does Jumanji 2 fit in?

A bad movie can make money. Some video game movies have done well at the box office, yes. They were still shit.

Thing is, Mortal Kombat is effectively as good as the game it's based on. You can ask little more than that for an adaptation.

@ Gaon

I'd say the same for the RE movies, too. It's actually kinda funny, Resident Evil: Afterlife (RE 4) is when the films became incredibly cheesy and tongue-in-cheek, just like the actual Resident Evil 4. Embrace the cheese.

And honestly, the first MK film had a better plot than the first two MK games combined. Nothing earthshattering but then, Mk never had a plot worth talking about until like, Deadly Alliance.