If you ever see the name “Alan Smithee” in the credits of a movie, it means that the real director thought the movie was so bad that he didn’t want his name on it.
Players know that many video games are based on movies, such as Fantastic 4, Chronicles of Riddick, Batman, Superman; the list can go on and on. But what about movies based on video games? How they did it? Below is a list of games made into movies in the last ten years, how they did it, and a prediction of game-to-film projects in the future. Made in 1993, it is a weak interpretation of the game in which Dennis Hopper plays King Koopa, an evolved dinosaur. There wasn’t much of a plot and the movie ran an agonizing 140 minutes. Audiences also felt the same way when the movie bombed at the box office. However, this did not stop Hollywood from producing many more video game-to-film adaptations, such as: Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, the Mortal Kombat series, the Tomb Raider series, and the most recent Doom. In 1995, the Mortal Kombat series was the next to hit the big screen. Based much more on the fan based games, it still had no real plot and seemed more like an old fashioned kung fu movie than a big budget movie.
Then came Tomb Raider in 2001, based on the 1996 game. This movie was a very good interpretation of the game, involving exploration, treasure, monsters, and most importantly Lara Croft, played by Agelina Jolie. Jolie resembled Lara Croft as well as any human being, so a big reason the movie did well is that she had a watchable character and a good story. Due to these aspects, the Tomb Raider movies set a new trend for future video game movies.
Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, made in 2001, was not really based on the games, but rather on the philosophies behind the games, namely parallel universes and the existence of spirits. However, the reason the movie lost $120 million dollars was not the plot but the GC animation. True, character mapping and texture shading was revolutionary for its time in the film industry, but due to the use of CG it failed to induce emotion with the characters’ eyes and faces, which in turn amounted to poor quality. acting and a flop at the box office.
Resident Evil, in 2002, tried a different approach in its adaptation in which it tried to have many different subplots to capture the viewer’s attention. It worked? No. The problem here was that Resident Evil became more of an action movie than a horror thriller like the games where. The movie itself was not that scary, it only had zombies, mutant dogs, and the Licker (the only real monster in the movie), so it goes without saying how this movie did at the box office.
Then there was fatality. It’s not the first of the first-person shooters, but it was the baddest. The Doom series has been staged time and time again. You are a space marine on Mars with a mission to close the portal to hell along with a huge arsenal of weapons like the rocket launcher and chainsaw. You’d think the producers could generate a decent script from the video game stuff, but I guess the producers must have been out for lunch because there was no reference to Hell in the movie. Instead, they were DNA experiments gone wrong on Mars. Instead of killing demons, the Marines were killing zombies. Hundreds of civilians were killed, while in the game only monsters were killed. Another failure that we will have to wait and see.
In Silent Hill, a key scene is when the heroine is told to memorize a map and the directions are simply left, left, right, right in nature to navigate through a maze within the film. What made the video game so popular was the ability of the player to make their own decisions within the game, whereas in the movie there is only one option when the brightness of the game is dimmed.
The Tomb Raider movies at this writer’s option were the only movies to actually deliver decent acting and plotting and thus did well at the box office. Does this mean that all video games to movies are going to be horrible? No. In fact, the news says that Peter Jackson is planning to change that by making a Halo movie, we’ll see if he keeps his promise.
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