Editorial: Is It Game Over for Video Game Movies?

Comic books have slowly worked their way up over the years to become the dominant goldmine for Hollywood to plunder. Yet in the last few months, the studios seem to have pillaged a new source to craft their cinematic outings. Hardcore Henry. Ratchet and Clank. The Angry Birds Movie. Warcraft. This winter’s Assassin’s Creed. Video game movies may have been a “thing” since the ‘90s, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen this many video game movies come out this rapidly.

And they’re not slowing down anytime soon. The Resident Evil films are still going, a Tomb Raider reboot with Alicia Vikander is in the works and Steven Spielberg is all set to adapt the gaming-heavy novel Ready Player One. Lest we forget Hollywood is still gestating over big budget films based on Halo, Uncharted, Bioshock, The Last of Us, Shadow of the Colossus and many more. There’s just one small glitch in the system: don’t all video game movies suck?

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Adapt This

It’s true that films based on games don’t exactly have the best track record. The Super Mario Bros., Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter films of the ‘90s all failed spectacularly. Fast forward to the 2000s and we have a few financial successes with Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider and the original Resident Evil. Too bad they both didn’t do so well critically, and their follow-ups even less so, even if Resident Evil is still chugging along. We’ve had Prince of Persia, a decent adaptation yet a boring film, and other minor films like Doom, Max Payne and Hitman that came and went silently. 

Hollywood keeps trying to make “surefire hits” out of popular games, yet none of them connect with critics or audiences. Most recently, Warcraft became the highest grossing video game movie worldwide, largely thanks to a huge opening in China. But a CG-heavy fantasy action flick was bound to open big there anyway (never forget Transformers 4.) The film still tanked with critics, and while franchise fans are enjoying the faithfulness to the lore, the consensus seems to be that it just doesn't work as a satisfying, standalone film. In other words, it's just another bad video game movie.

Given how the flops keep coming, why then is Hollywood still trying to (pardon the pun) get back in the game? Are studios desperate to make the first “good” video game movie, sparking the next big Hollywood trend? There’s no question that the potential is there. No one can say whether or not Assassin’s Creed will be the new Iron Man, and give other studios the blueprint for how to make a game movie “work.” What can be said is that the cinematic potential of video games will always be appealing, and it’s not hard to see why.

Films have always had an interesting relationship with both comic books and video games. All three are visual mediums, using images as their primary mode of storytelling. Yet all three are so distinct in the way that they tell their stories that adapting one medium to the other is harder than it looks. Comics at least have character growth, rising tension, and various storytelling structures that can be mined for a 2 hour film. It’s hard to condense decades of history into said film, yes, but it can be done. For video games, it’s an entirely different story.

Perhaps the Only Solution is Not to Play

Video games come in a variety of forms, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re very active in their storytelling approach. Unlike films, TV, books and comics, which are all passive, video games involve the audience actually participating in the on-screen adventures. Players take control of the game’s characters and lead them through a series of puzzles and challenges in order to reach a stated goal. Yes, we all know this. But trying to adapt what’s supposed to be an active experience into a passive one is actually extremely difficult. You know how boring it is to watch someone else play Halo or Call of Duty, while you just sit at the sidelines? Imagine that experience in a movie theater.

The reason Super Mario Bros. didn’t work was because the simple narrative of the game, coupled with the lack of well-defined characters, made the translation to film extremely difficult. What do we know from the games about Mario and Luigi? They’re…..plumbers? And……brothers? Um, the green one’s taller than the red one? They’re Italian? You see the point. Trying to craft a cinematic tale around them isn’t exactly a walk through the Mushroom Kingdom, if you get the drift.

This applies to pretty much every other game adaptation out there, even though as time marches on and games grow more sophisticated, so do the games’ stories. Lara Croft is a well-rounded person, as are the Resident Evil characters, along with the complicated lore of Azeroth from the Warcraft games. On paper, they would make for good films. It’s one of the reasons why the Assassin’s Creed film looks promising, since it’s a fantastic cinematic premise that has literally all of history to draw from. Then you look at how games like Uncharted and The Last of Us have such amazing stories that they’re essentially playable films, and it seems like a no-brainer to make movies out of them.

First Person Means No Person

But despite all this potential, video game movies are still flopping. And it doesn’t have anything to do with how well a filmmaker translates the game’s aesthetics into a movie (like Warcraft or, hell, the original Mortal Kombat). It has everything to do with filmmakers failing to take an active experience and turn it into a passive one. An experience that a film going audience can get invested in. If the story is too simple or the characters too flat, the film has to find a way to make you care for them.

The problem here is twofold. One, most video game stories are designed to be simple so it’s easy for players to follow the narrative as they go from one checkpoint to the next. Two, most gaming characters are cardboard cutouts by design, so the players can project whatever personality they want onto them to make them relatable. We see whatever we want to see in Mario, Link or the Master Chief because they come to us as blank slates, so we can easily identify with them as we play them. They’re surrogates for us, in other words.

Even in games like Skyrim or Fallout that come with their own built in lore, the players basically design and custom fit their own characters to fit their needs. Now try and take your customized Vault Dweller from Fallout, cast Kit Harrington to play him, and set him loose in a big budget movie. Even if Harrington played him to perfection, he would be given personality traits that contradict what players have already projected onto him.

It’s like when a movie fails to adapt a book properly because the readers have already worked up the perfect version in their minds, only a thousand times greater. Another thing to consider: we all love Halo’s Master Chief because he never takes his helmet off. We can imagine thousands of different looks for him under that mask. The minute you put a flesh and blood actor underneath that iconic helmet, then have him remove it in a film to give the A-list actor face time, you’ve just alienated your entire core fanbase.

Wreck-It Ralph vs. Hardcore Henry

Now some of you may be thinking, “If that’s really the problem, why can’t video game movies just adapt a film that replicates the experience of gameplay?” The response would be “have you seen Hardcore Henry?” While not an adaptation of any existing game, per say, this recent film attempted to mimic how it feels to play a Call of Duty-esque First Person Shooter game. It was shot with a Go-Pro, entirely in first person, with Henry’s backstory and personality conveyed through the people he meets.

Now that doesn’t mean that this narrative format doesn’t work. It obviously works great in the game world, as the billions made overnight on the latest Call of Duty can attest to. But that does not work for film. Both mediums are visual, yes, and they both turn to inherently cinematic storytelling tropes. But different mediums they remain, and as such they play by different rules. If you want to make a game into a movie, you have to preserve the essence of the game while making sure the story works as a film.

One of the only good video game movies in recent memory was Wreck-It Ralph. Yes, like Henry it’s not based on a specific game, although it cribs from Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, and Doom/Halo. That movie succeeded because it fused certain video game mechanics (evil boss fights, perfect heroes, racing games, shooting games, arcade games, glitches, hordes of enemies, trophies, etc.) into an original story that made for a compelling, passive viewing experience. In other words, it took what it needed to from games and used them to make a great movie. So really, Wreck-It Ralph has already laid out the blueprint for how to make a “good” video game movie. The answer, Hollywood, is to use select gaming elements in a way that makes for a great film.

Conclusion: Level Up, Hollywood

This is why Assassin’s Creed and Ready Player One still seem promising. Creed is taking the lore of the games and applying it to an original story, one tailored to be inherently cinematic and thus, make for an entertaining film without betraying the game’s essence. Ready Player One is a somewhat different story, since it’s based on a novel, but one that nevertheless is set almost entirely in a virtual game world and relies on many gaming tropes to tell its story. But because it’s already used those gaming elements in one medium (literature) to great success, translating it to film should be relatively simple. Still, since the novel takes gaming elements and puts them into a new story that works with a different medium, it helps the case.

So after Hollywood mines every last comic book and looks for the next big thing to adapt, video games could very well be it. Judging by this year, an argument could be made that Hollywood already looks at games as “the next big thing.” But as long as the game movies continue bombing, it won’t really spark a trend like Hollywood wants. Like comic books, Hollywood needs time to learn how to meld the essence of the source with the medium of film. In the end, it’ll be about quality over quantity. Hollywood simply needs to remember that they’re making movies, regardless of what they’re adapting. Once they do that, we could very well reach the next level in film making. And that’s a game everyone wants to play.