Video Games to movies (why is it so hard)

[Reasonable]

trashleg said:

Reasonable said:

asacatman said:
Why do people want game movies? The stories of games are usually the weakest part of the game. If the film uses a totally new adventure... then they may as well have just been a unique movie and not of a game. Game should stay games. We don't need good stories, it's about gameplay. Mario is a great example of this. That game series is still considered one of the all time best with a terrible story. Because it's FUN.

Totally agree (see my post).  Movies based on games are pure commercial affairs and money aside are just unecessary.

a lot of the time its the idea of character development tho, so to write a completely new story would be to write up some completely new characters and all that. someone might play a game and think "imagine if..." and think it makes a good story.

i hope thats how it works, anyway. i'd hate to think it was all marketability... *has faith*

And you've got to have faith.  Actually, having watched District 9, I did come out thinking that Jackson and Blomkamp could indeed have made a great movie based on Halo, and might actually have delivered the first decent game to movie film.  Pity it got canned.

On the whole, though, I would prefer people to make films to be good films, and not to try and leverage a game.  The simple fact is very, very few games really have a narrative worth putting in a film.

You might think a huge RPG has a huge narrative, for example, but it's all incident, when you boil it all down you have at best a slender narrative with characters who have limited depth and room for dramatic growth.

I think Deus Ex could backbone an interesting film, I'd love to see a something like Ico expanding into a lovely aminated film, but I think the focus will be on titles like Resident Evil, etc. which are C movies themselves so hardly the best starting point.

I will say though, that I would like to see a great film based on the basic characters and elements of Uncharted - that would work really well.  Of course, the game really aimed high for a solid B movie narrative with A movie production (like a certain Raiders of the Lost Ark) and it's inherently well set up to support a film as well.

Nathan Fillion even looks like Nathan Darke for pete's sake!