"The movie was okay, but the book was better."
"Movies based on video games are a bad idea."
I think these two problems are really the same problem, making a movie based on an existing story. For years the big problem was basing a movie on a book and everyone who read th book complained about what they got wrong. Then came Super Mario Bros. and ever since video games have suffered as much as books. But why? My theory is that it's simply very difficult to change formats. Books have infinite potential limited only by page numbers, movies have to fit between ninety minutes to three hours, unless you're Peter Jackson and turn it into a series, but let's not go there. When a book goes to film, some things just won't make the cut and they may be the most important details to the reader. Video games have a different, but equally difficult problem, they have a first person interactive element that gets lost in translation. Quite simply, everybody who plays a game plays it differently, so when you see the movie and they ran through a different play, it's upsetting. Of course, the biggest problem is that Hollywood just doesn't give a damn about getting any details right on video game movies, but in their defense it's not always easy. Bear in mind, many games are about one character with minimal dialogue, that does not translate well to the screen. Sometimes as they insert dialogue they lose track of what they are destroying in the process. Largely the problem is the audience, now that we've seen many failures, we are set up to expect it will suck and few of us have patience for anything. The result is that even when Hollywood does make something halfway decent, we still give a negative response. Hollywood just hasn't learned yet that you can't just slap a name on something and make that an instant hit. But consider some of the ideas we have given them to work with.
Super Mario Bros. - Two guys in caps and overalls run and jump through realms of bricks collecting floating coins and mushrooms that slide around coming out of boxes that, like the coins float in midair for no reason, while fighting turtles, venus flytraps and evil mushrooms, in order to rescue a princess only to be foiled by not one but seven cosplayers who all have the same message "Thank you, but our Princess is in another castle."
Double Dragon - Two brothers fight a street gang...eventually they get to the boss and rescue a girl, but only after fighting...a lot of gangsters... actually the same ones over and over again.
Street Fighter - self-explanaory, supposedly a tournament...there's a yogi that stretches beyond reason...a guy who is green and can electrocute you for no apparent reason...for even less reason half of the cast can throw energy projectiles...main antagonist is both psychic and psycho.
Mortal Kombat - another street fighter, only now we have more supernatural combatants, more blood, more violence...surprisingly the best out of the first four to become a movie.
Tekken - another street fighter, because even though UFC isn't as big as the NFL, we're going to bank on movie theater audiences paying to see fighting movies. Tekken doesn't really add anything new to the formula, no worthy dialogue or story, just fighting, little to no supernatural anything.
Doom - one guy fights an endless army of demons with a wide variety of guns.
Mostly I was disappointed by Final Fantasy which was made in house by the company that made the games and they managed to still screw it up, presumably because a distributor thought it would be easier to put out in theaters if they followed Hollywood's lead of marketing to the masses at the expense of the fan base. honestly these are the only ones I actually even looked at until Warcraft. I have heard of a lot of others, but aside from the ones above, many games that were turned into movies have had good stories to begin with. The problem with later games is that they have stories that were written for a single player to interact with, not for a large group of people to passively watch. Arguably, you could probably get better entertainment on Twitch watching someone actually play through a game than watch any of the movies based on them. But in Hollywood, executives are mostly older people who started before video games and still don't actually play them, so they don't know crap. These are the guys that approve the budget and they will not allow film makers to make movies unless they are confident in the film and they won't be confident in the film until they see a script, and as someone who has tried to make a script, generally submitting a few pages of dialogue interspersed with fight scenes noted to be choregraphed later doesn't inspire confidence for someone to part with millions of dollars with any hope of return on investment. To write a script they need to pad with a lot of material that doesn't make any sense. When you add in the director, now you've got a third person who has added a third irrelevant perspective. At no point, apparently, does anyone ever take what is filmed and compare it to actual game footage to consider if it looks right at all, and if it does occur to someone, it's not somebody in the driver's seat.
Personally, I say we need to let more fans make movies dedicated faithfully to source material, and until then, we need fans to relax or Hollwood will give up on us too.
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