MovieChat Forums > Assassin's Creed (2016) Discussion > What can break the video game movie curs...

What can break the video game movie curse?


Uncharted and a Tomb Raider reboot are currently being made. Any chance one of them will be good?

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I don't think there is any real movie curse although there are indeed plenty of sorry ass doozies. How about if those freakin' (I wanted to use another word) Hollywood knuckleheads start hiring writers that can craft a great story that holds up both on paper and on screen. And how about stop slapping PG13 on originally M mature themed material just so they can get kiddies everywhere and entire households to go enjoy the oh so fun Assassin's Creed movie.

Say what you'll say about my following list I think are the best adaptations and have a special place in my heart. They either made some kind of money at the box office, have a cult following, or are just plain fun to watch;

1. Tomb Raider
2. Silent Hill
3. Resident Evil
4. Hitman
5. Final Fantasy

These are my personal opinions and in no way reflect the views of the thousands of professional movie critics here on IMDB....

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Need:
Halo movie(s)
MGS movie(s)

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Pong: The Motion Picture

Guaranteed to be a box office smash!

;D

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What is exactly breaking the curse?

A 500 million return on a 100 million dollar movie based on a game?

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It not sucking balls.

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Easy. Stop hiring awful directors and awful writers and give it to someone who will respect the source material.

5 Nights at Freddy's if done right will make a great horror comedy.

Outlast if done right will make a phenomenal film.

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I thought Warcraft was OK

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Fallout 1

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A good movie.

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A good movie which might not happen any time soon. The differences between the two mediums are just vast, more than what either Hollywood or the video game companies probably even realise.

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[deleted]

Yes but at least with that theme park ride the scriptwriters were free to write their own story around. Yes, I'm fully aware of how game narratives are evolving because I'm a gamer and I also wanted to see some of my favourite storylines from games put into movies. However, I've been thinking about it since Warcraft's general reception and I think that the complexity might be part of the problem, plus the narrative structure in computer games are different from the narrative structure of movies. Firstly, a movie screenplay normally has a three act structure and the stories are usually very linear while in games, the narratives are very nonlinear and either usually structured around goals given to the player or it exploits the interactivity of the medium to help tell the story which include things like a complex web of side plots that are optional for the player to complete or multiple character arcs that can take up to 20 hours to unfold. A screenplay is actually very limited in what it can do and there are only a certain number of formats it hold especially with the time constraints such as, in some cases, having to fit into a 2 hour screen time. So, it's actually very difficult to fit a very complicated computer game storyline with dozens characters that develops over 20 hours into the 3 act structure of a 2 hour screenplay and still leave room to properly develop the characters.

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[deleted]

Adapting video games that have enough plot and charecters to make a good movie.
I give you the Fallout games, some of the better D and D based computer games..."Planescape:Torment" in particular as examples.
Problem is they are adapting action video games, that ,however fun they might be to play, they really don't have a strong enough plot or deep enough charecters to make a good movie.

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While I think you are mostly right, DrNaud does have a point in that the freedoms offered by just how bare bones content there is to adapt from a theme park ride is much more of a strength. Sometimes I feel like games proximity to film as a medium is one of the pitfalls game to movie adaptions have. As movie like some games are, they are still written around the medium they are based on (This includes how demographic heavy the game industry is and how less demanding people are on the plot of the game than a plot of a movie). Where as literature, comic books and even theme park ride adaptions requires some sort of vision to even translate the story, directors/ writers adapting video games can use the source material as crutch way too much.

But as to the main topic. One massive problem I have with this debate is that people begin to list games that they think good be adapted well. While I think some games would be easier than others, the bigger problems lie in the process of adapting the source material than the actual source material itself.

And IMO one of the biggest issues with process? Is that the process, especially these days is (much like the games industry itself) is hyper commercialized. In that most of these adaptions are being made to cash in on brand recognition than they are an attempt to genuinely attempt to make a quality film. People have mentioned getting a good director in, which yeah would be a good start, but the studios aren't interested in that. They aren't interested in getting a talented director who will go through the process of boiling down the source material and rebuilding it into something worth watching, especially with just how horribly that could go wrong and with how much money gets invested into these films, including the copyright.

And on the other hand, you have fans, which could either mean those working on the projector the fans that the studios who want to cater to that often latch on to unimportant surface details at the expense of what was core to the original experience, or fans latch onto some part of the core experience that is simply untranslatable, but still insist on trying to translate it. One of the big examples of this was Pyramid Head in the Silent Hill movies.

And as for fixing the curse? Well, IMO, there are two likely scenarios. One is that one studio will just get lucky one day. They will hire the right director for the right game to adaption (probably one with a game that's already highly cinematic). The other is a visionary director tackles a smaller game, boils it down to its core components, and most importantly rebuilds in his of her vision instead of just trying to recreate to gaming experience or cashing in on the success of the game. It will likely be something like a Silent Hill that takes the haunted town as a reflection of a personal demon and use that as a base for an entirely new story with new monsters. Or an AC movie that just drops the present day BS and just tells an historical politics drama. Or heck, there are even some great indie games that could be made into great art house films like Glitchhikers

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