We live in an entertainment age where video games have evolved from pong and the arcades to a billion dollar industry, which rivals the giants of the entertainment world. Now that Hollywood has seen that video games are a viable money maker, they want a piece of the pie as well.
Unfortunately for us nerds, that does not always mean we are going to get a quality product.
Over the last 15 years, studios have pumped out video game movies hoping that because they were named Tomb Raider or Mortal Kombat, they would rake in the same kind of revenue the original games made.
The saddest part is that some of them actually have. While the Resident Evil movie series has not been completely abysmal, the movies are not winning any awards either. Yet the series has made almost a billion dollars worldwide.
While some video game movies have proven to be viable movie franchises, there has not been many, if any, that have delivered to its fans.
I enjoyed the Tomb Raider movies as a child, but if you talk to hardcore fans of the series, they will just shrug their shoulders. But then there are movies like Doom or the hated Super Mario Brothers movies that you do not even dare to bring up to longtime fans of those series.
The worst tragedies of this trend are the movies that were lost in the shuffle.
Some of the biggest and best names in gaming had a lot of promise as they were being turned into movies.
The Halo movie had names like Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg attached to it. The Bioshock movie had Gore Verbinski set to direct until it fell apart. New Line Cinema still has the Gears of War rights.
All of these worlds have amazing movies in them somewhere; it is just that none of them panned out.
One of the reasons video games-to-movies has not worked story wise yet is because there has not been a studio/director to really understand that these are two different art forms.
Video games take hours and hours to develop a world and characters that you care about, a luxury movies simply do not have.
While life for gamers at the cinema has been dark, there is reason for hope in the future.
Studios seem to be finally realizing that they need to throw big names and big cash at these movies. Movies like Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed are coming within the next few years, with big budgets and stars like Michael Fassbender and Marian Cotillard.
Another factor could be the Deadpool movie. One of the reasons movies like Gears and Bioshock never saw the light of day is because in order to make those movies true to the source material, they would need a hard R rating and a lot of money to bring the worlds we love to life. That was a very high risk gamble for studios.
The reason I bring up the Merc with a Mouth is because Deadpool could be the first hard R rated movie to make a ton of money. This could pave the way for more violent video game movies to get the green light because studios will see that nerds come out to see movies as much as kids and families do.
Hollywood is all about trends, and if they see something that has worked, they will be willing to throw their money at it. While the history of video games to movies is a dark one, there could be a day where we finally see a faithful adaptation of the games we love so much.
But until that day, I think I will stick to playing video games instead of watching them.
