Re:Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
by andrewflnr on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @10:52PM
(#16817614)
It may be the similarity of the medium that hamstrings Hollywood. Going from prose to a movie tends to absolutely force a lot of compromises. You no longer really have the option of extensive narration, seeing into characters' thoughts, etc, and the whole thing has to fit into 200 minutes at the outside. A video game already operates under similar constraints as a movie, so it's possible to create a movie that's very similar. You just take a recording of a well-done play-through as your outline. It could be that without the excuse provided by the drastic change in medium, Hollywood types lose the nerve to do what's necessary.
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Re:Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?
by ehnto on Thursday April 12, 2018 @01:42AM
(#16818321)
I would argue that the medium of video games is more free to explore a rich story than either books or movies, video games benefit from the ability to explore story and lore asynchronously from the main plot, with unique branching, and at the players leisure, so appealing to a wide audience with every detail isn't necessary.
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.