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Where are all the movies?


Thin Crust
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So I'm not itching to get my hands on tickets to see video game movies, but I have heard over and over again that there are plans to make a God of War movie, Uncharted movie, Sly Cooper, Darksiders, Shadow of the Colossus, Halo, Bioshock, MGS..... Whenever there is a popular game, they talk about making a movie out of it, but other than Ratchet and Clank, what happened to them all?  Why make promises of projects that never get to see the light of day?

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Games don't always translate well to movies. BioShock could. Sly Cooper is still coming. Ratchet and Clank is coming soon. 

Assassin's Creed movie is coming soon, they were talking about doing a sequel. Half-life and Portal movies are coming from Jar Jar Abrams, but it'll be a while before they see the light of day. The deal for Halo fell through and became District 9, good movie. 

Also National Treasure was NOT made in '84

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It's not a movie per-se but here's a fantastically realised short of Metroid for those who've not seen it:

If film companies were to be more sympathetic to the IP rather than following the money, I expect there would be a whole swathe of feature films of the above's calibre. The closest similarity to "Game Movies" I can think of is "Comicbook" movies, and look how hit-and-miss they can be. They seem to have sorted themselves out in recent years, but that seems to be because they've realised you just shouldn't anger comicbook fans. I doubt gamefans would get the same respect, so I consider it a blessing there are very few game films, all said.

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22 minutes ago, Odai said:

If film companies were to be more sympathetic to the IP rather than following the money, I expect there would be a whole swathe of feature films of the above's calibre. 

Most games do not make good movies because most games have below direct-to-DVD level narrative. The ones that are better and tell their stories well through gameplay do not need to be adapted into a movie as that would just be redundant and probably inferior anyway.

22 minutes ago, Odai said:

The closest similarity to "Game Movies" I can think of is "Comicbook" movies, and look how hit-and-miss they can be.

Comicbook movies and TV shows have consistently been among the most critically well received blockbusters of the 21st century.

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5 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

Most games do not make good movies because most games have below direct-to-DVD level narrative.

This is where sympathetic and creative scriptwriting and plot development should come in - spend the money on this, and not the AAA stars.

5 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

The ones that are better and tell their stories well through gameplay do not need to be adapted into a movie as that would just be redundant and probably inferior anyway.

Comicbooks, which you also quoted me on, and I reply to below, are consistently well written and drawn, but make it to movies and TV shows. So games are no exemption from this.

5 hours ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

Comicbook movies and TV shows have consistently been among the most critically well received blockbusters of the 21st century.

Perhaps in the past 5-10 years, because as I said, they've upped their game- especially in TV. but certainly not the entirety of the 21st century. A few flops that spring to mind are Hulk, Fantastic 4, Daredevil, Xmen Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern. Also, when you say critically acclaimed, which critics?

I'm not picking a fight, but a lot of how this conversation is turning out is speculative and opinion-based. Sorry if I misread your reply and wrongly interpreted it as hostile. 

EDIT: Also apologies Thin Crust for diverting the course of the topic, I was compelled to elaborate/explain myself. 

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I'm gonna pay good money to see Michael Fassbender fall 300 feet into an assassination target, get up like he didn't even feel it, and say "requiescat in pace" 

I imagine in this scenario the audience would go insane, popcorn and sodas would be flying everywhere. Women would begin weeping. Three more sequels would be announced, and the blu-ray pre-orders would go platinum

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12 hours ago, Odai said:

This is where sympathetic and creative scriptwriting and plot development should come in - spend the money on this, and not the AAA stars.

Comicbooks, which you also quoted me on, and I reply to below, are consistently well written and drawn, but make it to movies and TV shows. So games are no exemption from this.

Perhaps in the past 5-10 years, because as I said, they've upped their game- especially in TV. but certainly not the entirety of the 21st century. A few flops that spring to mind are Hulk, Fantastic 4, Daredevil, Xmen Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern. Also, when you say critically acclaimed, which critics?

I'm not picking a fight, but a lot of how this conversation is turning out is speculative and opinion-based. Sorry if I misread your reply and wrongly interpreted it as hostile. 

EDIT: Also apologies Thin Crust for diverting the course of the topic, I was compelled to elaborate/explain myself. 

I'm not trying to start a fight :<

It's just that, everytime the subject of game movies comes up, someone will insist that game movies would be better if the directors/writers had more respect for the source material. I don't completely agree and I feel that over-simplifies it.

Kirk Kjeldsen, a cinema professor, explained it best I feel in an article last year. He argued that games tend to not make very good films because most films (like comics, etc.) are 3 part stories - a clear beginning, middle and end. What is the "middle" of Super Mario Bros? Exactly where does Street Fighter begin? What about games like Fallout, Vampire: The Masquerade or Deus Ex? These games can be experienced in a non-linear fashion and have tons of characters. How do you adapt that to a linear, 3-act, 1 -2 hour movie while still getting the most important plot details (which span dozens of hours in-game) and characters right and true to the fans? Kjeldsen felt, and I agree, that Prince of Persia was successful in taking the best elements of the game and adapting it to film.

Warcraft, Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider (Go Daisy Ridley!) and Uncharted could be successful because their characters can easily be fit into different scenarios as the games don't have such strict continuity and their settings allow for a lot of interpretation. They fit the standard adventure movie style pretty well. 

Castlevania was planned to be a movie. How? Almost every game is simply two parts - get to dracula and kill dracula. The hours of action in between does nothing to drive the story forward. It would be no easy task.

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There's no need to fight really... the bottom line is that they don't put as much effort into the movies, the screenplays, whatever -- because they believe the characters and world hold enough appeal due to being part of an existing property. So then we get game movies that are, by all accounts, subpar. As if Zack Snyder saw a game trailer and was like "These people wear costumes and there's action involved? This would make a GREAT MOVIE!!"

Which is my theory for what happened with Batman vs. Superman.......

...................but that's a whole 'nother thread. 

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9 hours ago, k-wix said:

Calling it now - Warcraft is going to change the way games are handled in movies in a huge way - we're going to get a lot of them post-warcraft success and they will be respectable, much in the same way that comic-books are going now.

Pretty much this, if Warcraft gets good reviews and/or makes a ton of money.

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