Why are so many video game film adaptations so awful?

[RadiantFlamberge]

I have mostly been against adapting video games to movies. Super Mario Bros. would probably have worked better as an animated CGI movie. Samantha Mathis is OK as the Princess, but the other actors in this one look totally off. Bob Hoskins is totally miscast as Mario. Street Fighter's live actors didn't work well with one exception. I'd rather have had SF done with interpolated rotoscoping like A Scanner Darkly. As it is, Raul Julia (R.I.P.) is very good as M. Bison, but that's it. I don't care for the arcade game which was based on the movie... I see what they were trying to do with it, but it can't hold a candle to Super Street Fighter II or any Mortal Kombat. The controls are klutzy, especially compared against Super SF II.

 

The first Resident Evil movie is one I enjoyed. I like how it switches the main protagonist to Milla Jovovich's Alice rather than the games' main characters, who appear as her allies in the sequels. Not a bad job of expanding on the games' world.

Edited October 12, 2020 by RadiantFlamberge

[Redgrave]

I think another reason apart from directors not really knowing or caring about the material is that in some cases it's impossible to put a lot of context into a two hour movie. For example, there is no real way you could cram all the story and exposition of Metal Gear Solid into a single movie without either cutting out a ton of dialogue and then leaving out a bunch of context or other things that would help the story make sense. Either that or you make a 5+ hour movie that either nobody will go to or won't sit through with only the diehard fans actually watching the whole thing. It's part of why I hope the rumored Metal Gear Solid movie never becomes an actual thing since I don't see anything good coming from it without removing a ton of things and making it so far from the original that it might as well not be called Metal Gear Solid at all. Sure, you could also just split the movie into parts but I think at the point it might as well be a mini-series.

 

On the other hand I think a Halo movie could work fine with the right people involved. You could just do an expository narration with certain footage to accompany it and then move on to the main story since it's simple enough to understand. Max Payne should have worked since it's a story about a vengeful cop but they took too many liberties and Mark Wahlberg was terribly miscast to be Max Payne.

 

That said I enjoy the first Mortal Kombat movie since it's just cheesy 90s martial arts stuff, and from what I understand the first Silent Hill is fine since it functions as a good horror movie, and Sonic the Hedgehog sounded like it was pretty good too since it was done by someone that seemed to care about it and I guess it was easy to work a lot of the stuff from Sonic into a kids movie.

[bmg_ps]

The weird thing is that, despite accepting some of the adaptations as bad films, some of them are kind of my guilty pleasures. I can enjoy watch Tomb Raider or even Assassin's Creed, despite the poor overall quality.

 

However, I love the Uncharted franchise, but I'm almost certain the film will suck. Hope I'm wrong.

 

[MarioMan200]

Any studio in the industry making a movie based on a video game only care about how much it will sell rather than getting the source material from the game and translating that into a movie. Scott Pilgrim and Mortal Kombat (1995) are movies that come in mind are dedicated to the source material and put more effort put into it than other video game films. There's video game movies that tie into the main series of a franchise such as Dead Space: Downfall and Aftermath that connect to the plot between/during each game and gives us more insight to their respective world. Nowadays if films based on video games were made, they would have to pull in all of the stops into making the film as close to the games as possible to please their fans. Honestly its just up to the studio's decision to make video game films good because it's what the fans want or bad for the sake of what's gonna make them more money.

[usapro2017]

The Sonic The Hedgehog movie was good and has a 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Looking forward to the sequel!

[pinkrobot_pb]

Because the vast majority of games have plots and acting that never make it above that of a B-movie and when transferred to the big screen that becomes painfully obvious.

[Fizzgiglatte]

12 hours ago, AJ_-_808 said:

 

Yeah, the witcher could be a bit grey area - origin is in book form, but the witcher 3 game is what blew up it's popularity.

 

 

Still isn't an adaptation of the game, so it's kind of unfair to pin it against actual video game adaptations like Sonic, Mario, Assassin's Creed, etc. The netflix series and the games are both adaptations of books. It's like saying Game of Thrones counts in this discussion because of the telltale game or that Other GoT/asoiaf game that Existed briefly (btw did anyone even like that game lol)

 

11 hours ago, pogo_loco said:

 

I liked Silent Hill.  Do these stats qualify as mediocre?  https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/silent_hill

 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mfnhu8sO5k

 

 

Agreed. The first Silent Hill movie is decent imo. Made some weird changes, but some other understandable ones too, like adding in Pyramid Head and nurses because they are iconic. It's definitely not awful or bad but decent enough to watch a few times. Though, if I were gonna suggest a horror movie to anyone, I probably wouldn't suggest Silent Hill. It's just not a great horror film. 

 

Again, game to film adaptations suck the same way books and theater do. Just sometimes the original medium was better. 

[pogo_loco]

12 hours ago, Fizzgiglatte said:

Though, if I were gonna suggest a horror movie to anyone, I probably wouldn't suggest Silent Hill. It's just not a great horror film.

That's fair. 

 

I wonder if it’s harder to make a game into a movie or a movie into a game?

 

(Put your hand down E.T. and let someone else answer.)

 

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-worlds-worst-video-game

 

Edited October 12, 2020 by pogo_loco
Didn't read all of the other posts before responding...

[funboy1246]

aside from the first mortal kombat, silent hill and sonic, i can't think of any good ones. mostly it boils down to either a glorified commercial for the company (mario bros) to been too low budget (first resident evil) or poor casting and directing (anything uwe boll touched). they change too much of the core story to try and appeal to a wider audience in many cases too. or they're an adaption of a game with such massive lore that trying to fill you in on all of it is near impossible (WOW). just my opinnion tho

[PhyrxianLibrarin]

Well the "movie makers are trying to cash in on games without understanding them" argument has been made, so I'll make a different argument.

 

I think it's because video games as a medium are intrinsically tied to the control mechanisms. The fact that you are controlling the action on the screen creates natural empathy with the player character. When Sonic misses a jump and falls into a pit, you don't say "oh no Sonic died", you say "oh no I died". That's you falling into the pit, fighting those monsters, flying through space, finding that lady's pan. You can't help but feel connected to a person or character you spend hours guiding through the world.

 

As soon as you put the character on screen though, it isn't you anymore; it's someone else, and all that empathy is gone. They go from being a player-character to a non-player-character, because movies don't have a player. Suddenly The Witcher isn't about what I would do if I were Geralt; it's about Geralt, and what someone else thinks he should do, and I just care less about that. I may as well be watching someone else stream the game on Twitch, and as we've all seen, some games are much more suited to streaming than others.

 

This is the same reason why game adaptations of movies are flawed. Movies tell a specific narrative story, and giving the audience any amount of agency over where that story goes undermines it. The Wachowskis said it really well at the end of the Matrix games. Their story requires Neo to martyr himself to save humanity; that works really well in a movie, but it doesn't work at all in a game where you play as Neo and may not feel the need to do so, so they replace it with a huge boss fight instead. And games can fail at this as well; look at the controversy around the endings of Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed 3. The writers had an ending in mind, and they were going to cram you into it regardless of how you felt about it.

 

I think this is why Sonic the Hedgehog worked; it wasn't about Sonic, as much as it was about "what if you dropped a literally mid-90's cartoon video game character into a realistic world?" The audience isn't meant to identify with Sonic, we were meant to identify with Tom, which is much easier as I am not actually a blue hedgehog.

 

Edit: Also the Mortal Kombat movie is awesome, come at me.

Edited October 12, 2020 by PhyrxianLibrarin

[DrakeHellsing]

I agree with people about Sonic and Silent Hill.  Those were good to me.  And I think I'm one of the few that enjoyed the Doom movie, not sure why though.

 

It's been far too long since I've seen the Mortal Kombat movies (not the animated ones, I mean the live action ones), so I can't say much on those.  But I do remember having fun with the second one, even if it was one of the worst ones out there, especially the whole, Shao Khan turning into that terrible CGI thing.

[ZachBoardyHD]

Unpopular opinion, but I actually enjoyed the Resident Evils and the first Silent Hill film (the second one was garbage) and even the Underworld series,even though they're not based on a video game series, I always thought they were ?

[Fizzgiglatte]

26 minutes ago, PhyrxianLibrarin said:

Suddenly The Witcher isn't about what I would do if I were Geralt; it's about Geralt, and what someone else thinks he should do, and I just care less about that.

 

Please remember The Witcher is a book series before anything else. A very long book series. You were never meant to be Geralt. It's a book turned video game. 

 

And I agree with you on everything else, but only to a point. Not every game is about you or your decisions, linear stories exist and have existed since the beginning of video games even having plots to begin with. Assassin's Creed 3 and Mess Effect 3 aren't comparable in that sense. One is a very linear story where you don't really have control over it from the start, similar to a book or movie. The other has a mostly linear narrative, with branching paths. You are allowed to dislike AC3's ending and critique it, but I think it's a bit harsh to say they crammed it in there, and I think it's missing the point to say "whether or not anyone liked it". When you write something like that, it doesn't really matter what player input would be. It's just the story. Whether or not it's good writing is a separate issue. 

 

Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, and many other games actually have stories that would be really well suited for a movie or series if dealt with properly. Sadly, no one does. Or, it becomes obviously clear that the story wasn't very strong in the first place.

 

I still think video games are made as video games for very obvious reasons and are better like that. Almost everything is 100% better in its original medium. 

[Z1MZUM]

Street Fighter the Movie, is worth it just for the laughs.

 

[Xenoblast91]

The concern is complex. Firstly, you have the audience. To take an example, let's look into the MCU. The layman knows nothing about comics or the like; moreover, the whole comic universe is convoluted, contradictory and often non-linear (at least in Western mainstream line of comics). Sure, many could recognize Spider-Man or Wolverine, but would they know who's Ben Reilly? Well, people one want to watch a movie (assuming they are paying attention to it) and just have a glimpse over it without much context. Therefore, to make a complex thing so plainly understandable for the masses is a task that will sacrifice substance from the source material. 

 

Now, as many above have correctly asserted, the plot of a video game is only a part of it. The essence of them are the interactivity. And most of it, is indeed the sense of the plot  Hence, when we see a movie based upon a video game looks cringe, awful and nonsensical. Sonic in recent times just make it like a very kiddo movie but the plot itself lacks any sense, because, how can you explain that a hedgehog can run at light speed without the context that comes from another dimension? But other movies like action related as Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter or Resident Evil, can have more or less content from the original work. 

 

But... Sometimes, the producers just plainly hate video games overall. Think of it. This industry produces  sales of US$134.9 billion annually worldwide as 2018, according to Wikipedia; while Hollywood does US$41.7 billion for yearly releases, again in 2018. I can see why to hate those numbers... Plus, with a US$50 purchase, you can have fun even for years without making you bored. Then why to bother to watch a movie for entertainment? This is the view from the movie producers, in my opinion. And to add to the matter, the latest Dragon Quest movie was panned, to say the least, for its ending which deals a lot from I have already explained. That truly hurt me, as was expecting something that finally make respect to players and movies overall. If you ever bother to watch it, please avoid it. You'll waste your time for sure. 

 

On the other hand, I find the 90s movies about video games as a cultural heritage as the cheesy and ubiquitous attempt to translate the new boom from that industry into the movies, which helped a lot in fact to rocket the sales of many games in that time. However, there's a plethora of video game related material transformed into films, like the Halo CGI series, which again can point out that a live action adaptation always errs in many ways that cut of more than the half for the actual content of the game. 

Edited October 13, 2020 by Xenoblast91

[pogo_loco]

4 hours ago, Fizzgiglatte said:

Almost everything is 100% better in its original medium.

 

On that, my dog would have agreed.  “Chase the Chuck Wagon” wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as a bowlful of Purina Puppy Chow.

[Maaden_Swe]

Do you want them to be good, or do you just assume they will be bad. 

 

 

[RadiantFlamberge]

On 10/13/2020 at 1:16 AM, Maaden_Swe said:

Do you want them to be good, or do you just assume they will be bad. 

 

 

The latter. I'm a serious skeptic about them. Too many video game movies have been bad that when I hear of another one in the works, I say "Oh, no". Even then, one I hope turns out well is the Illumination CGI-animated Super Mario movie. They should hire Charles Martinet. It wouldn't feel right having a different actor voice Mario, Luigi, and Wario.