What Will a Successful Videogame Movie Look Like?
Hollywood wants to cash in, but the formula remains elusive.
There’s an evolution to every artistic medium that eventually sees it go from something regarded as solely for the geeky or immature to a multibillion-dollar corporate venture. People used to think acting in general was a low and disreputable profession, and now being a famous enough actor basically exempts you from accountability to your fellow human beings. Pearl-clutching elders used to think novels—novels—were scandalous, and now the most boring ones are required reading.
Film, right from the beginning, has been a medium that has happily adapted stories from other media. Some of film’s bedrock titles are adaptations of stage productions and novels. This is to speak nothing of Marvel Studios’ success, which stems entirely from adapting a century of comic books, with results that now seem to break box office records like clockwork.
So it’s understandable that plenty of people are wondering when we’ll finally get a good adaptation from the world of videogames—a genre that in my own short life has gone from being completely dismissed to being of the utmost importance to the same Hollywood executives who thought it was a good idea to try to adapt the board game Battleship.
You sunk my ill-conceived franchise!
For my own part, I think it’s worth asking what a successful videogame adaptation would even entail, since I sort of don’t care how much money a good movie makes as long as it’s good. I argue that we haven’t yet seen a perfect adaptation since 1995’s Mortal Kombat, and no, I am not joking about that. I can’t think of a studio today that, even when faced with casting a Chinese character who is provably the best martial artist in the world, would actually cast a Chinese-American actor like Robin Shou—who actually has studied martial arts and won some acclaim in the world of Wu Shu.
Pictured: An Asian lead portraying an Asian character. Who is about to fight an ice ninja.
Why we haven’t had what I consider to be a successful adaptation, even as we are seeing more and more attempts, will I think tell you a lot about the tough road ahead for those who want to try.
A Built-In Bias Remains
Remember the early-to-mid ’90s, when we got adaptations of The Shadow, Dick Tracy and The Phantom, comic characters basically nobody had cared about in decades? The impression one gets is that Hollywood tastemakers, who are old people, heard about those Superman and Batman films and said to themselves, “Oh, comics? You mean the things in bubblegum wrappers and the funnies pages?” and proceeded to greenlight a bunch of low-budget period pieces that filmmakers had no idea what to do with. How do you make a film aimed at a young market out of The Shadow in that landscape?
Similarly, there seems to be some kind of ignorance about what sort of franchise you should aim at if you’re going to adapt a videogame to the silver screen. What person thought it was a good idea to make an Angry Birds movie? In explaining the premise of the game to an acquaintance who knew nothing about it, I explained that there are birds, and they are angry because some pigs took their eggs. To be clear: This is a great premise for a videogame because it can be explained in ten seconds and supports hours of scenarios. These are precisely the same reasons that it is terrible for the plot of a movie. Try watching the thing if you can stomach it. It’s padding a basic concept into an hour and a half of licensed pop music references and dated references.
This is one reason why the 1993 catastrophe Super Mario Bros. remains, 25 years later, one of my absolute favorite cinematic oddities. You almost, almost, have to admire the unbelievably misguided direction the filmmakers took, creating some insane world to check all of the boxes established by a videogame created entirely out of the fever dream of a then-scrappy team of coders. (Though, to be fair, it isn’t the craziest Mario script that exists.)
We are, finally, beginning to get some more contemporary adaptations, but they make altogether different mistakes.
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