Books like Eric Nylund's Halo: The Fall of Reach, Greg Bear's Forerunner Saga (Halo again), or Brandon Sanderson's Infinity Blade: Awakening are all pretty well-respected and did well in terms of sales. Probably because they manage to avoid falling into the temptation to simply recreate the game experience as a book. They use the game's plot as a starting point to influence the story without dictating it.
Of course, by deviating away from "the game" as fans experienced it, you risk alienating them because the final product doesn't match up with what they expect. And because the same fans are probably the reason why the studio is willing to finance the movie in the first place, I can sort of understand why Hollywood repeatedly tries to hew closely to the source game even though that approach has repeatedly screwed them.
The peculiar thing is that they face a somewhat similar situation when they turn a book into a movie. And yet, Hollywood is more than willing to take risks and deviate away from the source material when necessary. So what about video games in particular scares the studios away from doing the same?
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
Some games can even continue story telling for hundreds of hours, meandering through dozens of different storylines, arcs, characters, minute details, (Skyrim, Fallout,..). Some games even have their own books inside the games that the character player can read!
The medium really is quite a bit more flexible than a movie. Where I think some comments are suggesting that games are not story rich enough to translate into movies and that's certainly true in some cases, I would argue that the types of story telling are simply not always directly compatible with a linear movie story line.
In a video game situation most of these people need to look at the game and build a world that looks like it’s ripped from the game, or the fans get cranky. But once the director does this, isn’t he/she tainted by the source material?
For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting.
With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle.
Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage...
Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world.
If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it?
Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)
The challenge with this is that a
studio would be alienating fans
Star Was illustrates my point quite nicely: after a couple decades of world building they're already plumbing diminishing returns in one of the worlds largest and most popular IPs only one or two stories removed from their main narrative. I have high hopes for the Han Solo prequel, but Disney isn't putting money behind "alternative" Star Wars narratives until the nostalgia well is tapped, and even then they're going full-court on a trilogy.
Um, Rogue One?
The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic.
I really don't understand the appeal of this game.
Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2.
And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.
It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done.
Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
With the caveat that it's a nine year old game at this point.
Different stories need different mediums?
"Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
It can be good... in the right hands.
We're all debating various complex semantics when the only thing that ultimately really matters is talent... who ultimately is in control of these building blocks. Talent with the director, talent with the screenplay, talent with the acting, etc.
There has been plenty of dumb plots, stories, concepts, etc that have been turned into great movies by talented people. Reservoir Dogs, Clerks 1, Napoleon Dynamite, The Abyss, etc would all sound dumb, boring, or cliche on paper, but were made highly watchable by talented film makers working in their prime.
Just like startups, the only thing that matters is people, not how clever your original idea is. You could have the perfect movie idea, which many big budget have had (which translate well into trailers and per-release marketing), but turn out to be awful once it's turned into the 1.5hr+ long final product.
Just Cause 2 was the best "shitty action movie" video game I've ever played!
Holy crap, this is bad. 3% on Rotten Tomatoes...
Applying those words to the Resident Evil sequels surely is some form of crime against humanity
I was about to bring this movie up as a counter-example, but I guess the opinions on this are very much split.
As with many other franchises, the follow-ups aren't worth watching.
It's always refreshing to see movie directors make a great movie that has a potential for mediocre sequels, but not give in to that temptation (e.g. Matrix).
Directors pretty much define the quality of the movies, so it's more important to follow them instead of the franchise itself.
That might be one of the first times that I learned to enjoy both a movie and a book separately, even if the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book. Now, I actively enjoy things like that, which are faithful in only a few of the dimensions of the original.
The movie was pretty much completely conceived before anyone pointed out a superficial resemblance between certain elements of it and the book, which led to a (sadly, successful) effort to secure rights to the book, Verhoeven reading a small part of the beginning of the book and tossing it in disgust, some light plot and character changes to justify the connection, and then slapping the title of the book onto the movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.
No, I read the novel, and didn't get that impression at all. (Nor did the novel contain strong barriers to citizenship; it simply portrayed a society which retained the [near universal, in the time and society in which it was written] idea that citizenship required a commitment to service, while reversing the [similarly generally accepted] idea that citizenship was mandatory and automatic with birth.)
And especially I don't think the descriptions equate to simple endorsement after reading lots of Heinlein, where to maintain that shallow attitude toward his work I'd have to think that Heinlein rapidly cycled through deep devotion to a wide range of radically contradictory ideologies. He certainly has certain themes and ideas that he liked to remix that had some relation to his actual political views, but, at least in his fiction, he doesn't seem to be given to simple presentation of what he sees as an ideal.
When you have audacity, nostalgia and guaranteed merchandising potential you don't need the movie to be good, unfortunately.
Or some capability of the new format.
Pulling standalone creative works forward into modernity is interesting. Some of my favorite movies are adapted from plays written before film. The timeline is shorter with video games <> movies, but AAA games are already cinematic and VR is basically here (needs lower hardware cost).
How would your favorite composer have used a synthesizer?
There is a reason that you see your childhood sold back to you 25 years later when you can be full of nostalgia and introduce your own kids to it fresh.
I'm pretty sure it's just because they want to tap into the large existing fanbase of those games.
I agree.
> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works and you can successfully create something new and wonderful when doing so.
> If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good."
The Nation Treasure movies were pretty well received despite being "Indiana Jones without a whip or Nazis". Apart from Indiana Jones being an archeologist tomb raider, the similarities with the Tomb Raider franchise are minimal. The reason the first Tomb Raider movies were so poorly received is because they just bad 90s action movies skinned with Tomb Raider IP, lipstick on a pig.
Looking at the new Tomb Raider movie's trailer, I'm betting it's going to fail as well. It might actually be a decent movie but fans of the game will hate it for rebooting the story and people who don't play video games will avoid it for being a video game movie.
In my opinion, successful adaptations work when they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is a great example. The book itself is a bit dated with 19th century science about vivisection that is preposterous to even the layman today. The premise though is sound and 1996 movie adaptation remains true to it while updating the science and as a result it is a wonderful adaptation.
The the Marvel Cinematic universe has been so successful despite plots that beat a dead horse, you could even argue that they repeat their own plots in subsequent movies. Despite that they're a resounding success because they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it by bringing the action to life in a way that's impossible in comics.
There are plenty of video games that have interesting characters, stories, or even premises that could be adapted into films, I think the main problem is that Hollywood is uninterested in making a good movie, they just looking to cache in on the IP.
> It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
I agree with your sentiment but disagree with your assertion that the innovation must come from the source. The play Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story in 1961 and was adapted into at least 10 films since yet the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet received critical acclaim despite retaining almost all of the dialog from the original play.
> "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason.
Why not? The Harry Potter series seems to have done pretty well for itself despite not really bringing anything really new to the table in terms of story telling or worlds. What makes the series so beloved?
I think there are plenty of video games that could inspire a decent movie. The universe that the Portal and Half-life games exists in has so much potential. I could see a compelling film being made about Barney, Alyx Vance and the City 17 resistance fighters prior to the events of Half-Life 2. Or maybe a story about some aspect of Aperture Science Laboratories as alluded to in Portal 2's various levels.
>All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
(I think it was) David Wong once pointed out about say the trench run in Star Wars: you fly down... and crash. You fly down and shoot the tie fighters and get shot down... You fly down shoot the ties, avoid the turrets and die... fly down and die... fly down shoot the fighters avoid the turrets and Vader kills you... fly down and die... fly down and get hit by the turrets...
Games allow you to fail, a lot, repeatedly and thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie. Books, paintings (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) don't alow you to fail; they can have the same structure as a film. Interactive media IN WHICH YOU CAN FAIL however requires it's own thing.
Most games will allow you to try until you succeed, very few accept failure and progress the story. When they do, people generally do not accept it and retry anyways [1].
> thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie.
I would argues that the much hated quicktime event has been used successfully to give users interaction and have the same flow and tension in a story.
The reality is that most people play through a game in a linear fashion, they may fail but they replay instead of accepting the failure, if that's even an option. Thus to the character and story, there was no failure.
Even still a solid premise can be adapted to either medium successfully. The movie Memento and the video game Braid are fundamentally the same idea presented in radically different ways with very different stories. The impact of the twist at the end of both though is equally poignant.
If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal