If you ever see the name “Alan Smithee” in the credits of a movie, it means the real director thought the movie was so bad they 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-movie 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 for an agonizing 140 minutes. Audiences also felt the same way when the movie bombed at the box office. However, this didn’t stop Hollywood from producing many more video game-to-movie 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 fan-based games, it still had no real plot and felt 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 take on the game, including 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 more 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 acting and a failure 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 grab 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 wasn’t that scary, it just had zombies, mutant dogs, and the Licker (the only real monster in the movie), so needless to say how this movie fared 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 the mission to close the portal of hell along with a huge arsenal of weapons such as rocket launcher and chainsaw. You’d think the producers would be able to generate a decent script from the video game footage, but I guess the producers must have gone out to lunch because there was no reference to Hell in the movie. Instead, it was DNA experiments gone wrong on Mars. Instead of killing demons, the Marines killed zombies. Hundreds of civilians were killed, while in the video 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 the wild to navigate through a maze within the movie. What made the video game so popular was the ability for the player to make their own decisions within the game, whereas in the movie there is only one option when the game dims.
The Tomb Raider movies in this writer’s choice were the only movies that actually offered decent acting and plot, 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 is that Peter Jackson is planning to change that by making a Halo series movie, we’ll see if he keeps his promise.
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