It is a chorus sung since the day Super Mario Bros. hit the big screen. It’s a chant, a proverb and perhaps even now a cliche… but after 15 years it’s still the truth:
“ALL VIDEO GAME MOVIES SUCK”
What is equally predictable, is that no matter how many times that proverb is proved correct, every time a new video game adaptation is announced, the lovers of that particular game pronouce “THIS TIME IT WILL BE DIFFERENT!”, but it never ever ever ever is. The old chorus of “All video game movies suck” continues to be true.
The simple law of percentages dictates that at some point, a good video game movie will be made to be an exception to the rule… but it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m willing to put money down that it won’t happen with Gears of War, which seems to be aiming at a summer 2010 release date. The good folks over at ComingSoon give us this:
(We) got a chance to talk to Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey about the status of the proposed Gears of War video game adaptation. “We’ve got our script on and a director we’re about to attach. We’ll hopefully make that early next year for the summer of 2010,” said Godfrey. It was announced in March of 2007 that New Line Cinema (now a unit of Warner Bros.) had acquired the feature film rights to Epic Games’ award-winning video game. Stuart Beattie was attached to adapt the project and Temple Hill Entertainment set to produce.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Gears of War isn’t a great game… only that it’s created to be just that… a game. It was created and crafted with game play in mind, not narrative story telling. This flick will in all likelihood end up just the same as all game movies. Scores of fans will insist it will be great, only to have their optimism burned in the fires of the eternal chorus: “All video game movies suck”.
Assassins Creed. That would make a great movie.
I have actually liked a decent amount of video game movies. Resident Evil, Doom, Tomb Raider (both), Resident Evil Apocalypse, Advent Children.
I go in expecting to be entertained in a way similar to the storylines of the source material, but never expecting it to be a direct copy. If they stick to the gist of it and give the nods out to the people who enjoyed the games, thats fine for me. I certainly got my enjoyment out of them and watch a good deal of them time and time again.
I wouldn’t say “All video game movies suck.” since I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. Though I will admit that there has been nothing Oscar worthy that has been put out. Advent Children being a very close exception.
I go back to what I’ve said before, can people not just be entertained and enjoy the movies, or must we always tear them apart if they do not meet our expectations?
I have been preaching this for some time; John has disagreed with me every time. A game to break the “bad movie related game” problem will be a movie based on Halo. There is so much story to Halo, some one mentioned this earlier. However, they would have to get the right people to work on it, to do it right. Also, again, if the right people working on Gears that it could be a great movie. I would love to see any species of the Locust Horde get a chainsaw to the face on a movie theater screen…..
hmm Silent Hill movie and Resident Evil movies didnt really suck,infact silence hill was awesome,prolly the best game to movie adaptation,ever.
i really don’t think it is the one paragraph general plot outline that makes a good movie or not, i think it is the execution. one idea is as good as another whether it omes from a video game or not.
video game movies get lazy/lame scripts because studios know they don’t have to try that hard in that department for them to make money.
The Halo movie directed by Neill Blomkamp could be the first one, but sadly that one never materialized. :-/
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!! This is so going to be the best movie to come out in the 2009/2010, its going to be so good I cannot wait anymore for this, Im going to go play the game again and again and again!!!.
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!
its proli not going to be as good as street fighter, but thats epic that film
to me it really depends on who’s going to star in the movie and how CGI is going to be. if it LOOKS good and it has widely known actors then i think it’ll do fine.
They are making a God of War movie, or were planning to at least.
I have hot sexy dreams about getting dutch doored by Marcus Fenix and Cole Train.
Can you imagine? *shiver*
I’ll have to agree that Silent Hill was a great movie and it should be watched in the same ambiance as the game (alone or with a friend in the middle of the night completely dark to scare the shit out of you).
As for Resident evil I would have to disagree with everybody about the movie. I think it was great and original, I want to believe that the main concept of the director, Paul Anderson, was to set a separate story from the ones in the game but in the same time period. And in my opinion it was accomplished.
Obviously movies like Doom, Tomb Raider, Hitman or Mortal Kombat II (the first one was like a woman in the bar going from 5 to 7.5 after a few beers) completely destroy any opportunity left for the franchise to explore amazing video games that would make incredible movies if loyal to the main original concept of the game.
As an example I would have to put the greatest game franchise of all time…….. GOD OF WAR!!!!!!! Thats right, if producers only stopped and looked at the story of Kratos and his battle against the gods people in Hollywood would say: THIS IS THE ONE TO DO RIGHT and with time. I believe that one of the main falls of video game movie franchise is that they do it without any primary concept involving the story of the game and placing it into a motion picture (not to mention that there is no way in hell that the directors of this movies so far have ever touched the game in their lives)
PS: as a final note i would like to say that if the Movie GOD OF WAR!!!!! ever comes out as an idea for producers, please place Frank Miller in the directors chair, its just a hunch that I have……
(sorry for the wrong spelling my written English is not that great)
What sucks is they will take the maturity out of the game when it’s translated over to a movie to gain a younger crowd. When I saw this news first thought in my head was “Doom” the movie. We all know how that came out.
I just hope Mad World is the Opening title song… that song rocks and ther GOW commercial always gets me jacked…
I know for a fact that for HALO movie masterchief wasn’t going to be the central character. He would have been a side character but a very important one.
It would have been a struggle of a group of people and how masterchief has to protect them etc.
I think that would work because truth is they don’t want to show masterchief in the movie too so there is no point making him the central character.
I don’t know about video games movies suck….. HALO and GoW both had a really good story line, as long as the writers and actors do it the right way, just like the game, I think both will do a sucess. And well if some people dont think so, let me write the scripts to both I’ll take those movies and there production companys stright to the top in Hollywood.
Only HALO can do both. Break curse and make shitloads boxoffice if marketed as an event movie.
I understand your point about how stories in video games were made without intentions to become adapted into movies. However, the same could almost be said about comic books back then. Hell, we have a Watchmen movie coming out, and while we don’t know the quality of the movie yet, it was considered impossible to make into a movie before.
Certain adaptations work, others don’t. Its just that games have had a real bad luck in proving they could make good quality films.
I also want to add: Why do a lot of films need to be live action? Animation can work better if it isn’t half-assed. I like Advent Children, but I really like their use for CG animation instead of pushing themselves over the cliff trying to make it live action.
I can only hope that there is one movie to break this curse. Of the films I like (Resident Evil, Doom, Mortal Kombat, FF7), it doesn’t change the fact that they still haven’t made a great gaming adaptation.
Silent Hill was far from being a bad movie ! and it”s not because a game is crafted with gameplay in mind that a good writer can’t produce a good story from it and it’s universe. take John August : “go”, “big fish”, “charlie’s angel” “charlie and the chocolate factory”, well he’s adapting Prince Of Persia to the big screen, he’s a terrific writer, and i m pretty sure that POP won’t be a crappy movie. Because a good script is everything, video game based or not.
IMO, there has been a few pretty good video game movie adaptations.
Resident Evil, while it strayed far from the game, was a well-done movie, IMO. The second was campy cheesy fun as well. The third…I had lots of issues with and didn’t like, but none of my complaints had anything to do with it being adapted from a game series.
Mortal Kombat was fairly decent in, again, a campy fun kind of way.
Silent Hill I just absolutly LOVED and is probably my favorite video game adaptation, although I imagine people who aren’t fans of the game series probably won’t get as much out of it as those who are. The director added in A LOT of tiny little details from the game, which really worked.
Nothing by Uwe Boll should count, cause it’s not the curse of video game movies that has struck his films, but the curse of Uwe Boll, so I’m not gonna bother counting his.
Doom was on the right path, but fucked it all up with ripping off Resident Evil with the virus thing, instead of making the creatures from Hell, and with that stupid Mortal Kombat fight at the end. If they had changed those two things, I think it would have been MUCH better.
And a lot of the animated ones work really well, such as Street Fighter II: The Movie, Fatal Fury, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, ect.
what about FFVII Advent Children?
the game barely had any sort of story to begin with…
Other than the usual, bad aliens…must destroy them. Good source material for a movie right there. How bout they actually pick a game that could be adapted to a movie successfully. Like ICO.
“It was created and crafted with game play in mind, not narrative story telling.”
Ya just because it wasn’t created without a nattative in mind doesn’t mean that a more deeper narritive couldnt be created based on the ideas layed down by the game ( i actually quite like the struggle in gears of wars. damn those locuts). It wasnt properly exposed in gears 1 maybe a film could help. (gears 2 looks like its got more story to it) ITake for instance games like mass effect that game story is as good any sci film i have ever seem. It has some wonderful imaginative ideas. Transformers was created as a Toy with limited narrative and how did that work. A gears of war film will not be rich in narrative but it could a good war film if done right.
It will suck if they decide to get Uwe Boll or Paul W.S. Anderson to direct,
come on videogame industry, there are other directors out there. sheesh
So Don just basically did what John said people always do, thus proving him right.
Campea you need to take a chill pill.
Gears of war game might not have much of a story but it has a lot of awesome stuff in it that can be translated very well on the big screen except maybe the insanely buffed up soldiers.
Also I think they will try to come up with a decent story for the actual movie. I know that they are making this a prequel to actual events in Gears of war game. With the whole pendulum wars stuff. As long as the movie has copius amount of blood and monster balls to walls action and explosions with beautiful and intense imagery then it is cool with me.
Seriously it is like transformers movie which hardly had any storyline to get excited about. 300 also wasn’t that great in the story department. Yet fanboys liked those movies a lot.
hitman was the first video game movie i really enjoyed.
so i have to disaggre to “ALL VIDEO GAME MOVIES SUCK”
btw john, did you think angelina jolies tomb raider sucked either?
i think it sucked, but i cant image you as a popcorn movie friend hating it too :)
Its true for all of them untill its not. I think the biggest reason for people to get excited over a great video game being adapted, and thinking “this time it will be different” is because one of them has to be good one of these days, even if its by accident. The law of averages should prevail someday and well get a good movie from one of theses games.
For the record, and I probably should keep this to myself, but I thought DOOM wasnt half bad, I even kinda liked it a little. *covers face and assumes fetal position*
I too agree, when it comes to videogame to film adaptations, all of them suck, most of the time. I didn’t mind the first Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat was silly but watchable.
If a film can possibly grab the essence of the game then I think it will work. Unfortunately every single one basically tries to recreate the game. I think they need to take a step back and look at what the comic book film franchise has done. X-Men wouldn’t work if they all wore the bright spandex costumes they had in the comic book. So they adapted. Once video game films learn to try this, we may have a winner.
Not holding my breath though.