Yesterday I did a Cheap Thoughts on the movie adaptation of the popular videogame franchise Silent Hill, and the main thing that I wanted to express in that post was that Silent Hill is in my opinion the best videogame movie we have ever gotten, certainly the best adaptation of a videogame so far. But then that's an interesting topic to discuss, can movies based on videogames ever be good? The time we live in now, videogames have some amazing stories, writing and themes that most definitely put them up their with movies as art, in many ways, they surpass movies as art. The Last of Us, Shadow of the Colossus, Mass Effect, Spec Ops The Line, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, all amazing in so many ways, and those are only a handful of videogames that do this. Now I do firmly believe that videogames can be made into great movies, but they're looking at it the wrong way. Take something like The Last of Us, everyone says it would make a perfect movie, and while I agree it would...it doesn't need to be. The Last of Us was a perfectly written, acted, paced story and turning it into a movie, while it wouldn't be bad (You would have to really fuck up to make it bad) a movie isn't going to be able to add anything, just take away things by making the story shorter and taking away the gameplay.
Now I did do a post on what videogames I would like to see get movies because they could translate well and a movie version could add something new, so clearly I do think that these are two mediums than can work well together, so why haven't they? Well first of all, not a whole lot of videogames in the 80's and 90's focused much on story, so why they ever thought they could adapt Super Mario Bros and Mortal Kombat into movies, I don't know. Another reason is videogames can be a lot more ambitious than movies, take something like Devil May Cry, something so over the top, so large of a scale that it is hard to picture a film ever doing something like that, but if they were, they would have to have enormous budgets and the bigger the budget, the bigger the risk.
But really, all it takes is one. The big money maker these days is easily superhero films, but people forget that there was a time where a good superhero movie was a rare event. Superman (1978) was the first mainstream hit of the genre, but we wouldn't get another hit like that until Batman (1989) and then throughout the 90's we had to go without a single good superhero movie and they were seen as box office suicide and a genre of movies never to be taken seriously. That was until 1998's Blade, which was dark, mature and above all else, a big hit, thus opened the floodgates for X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman Begins, and eventually get to where we are now with The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman V Superman. All it took was that one risk, not starting off with a juggernaut like Thor or Wonder Woman, but going small and then slowly building up to the point where we can see characters like Dr Strange, Aquaman and Thanos on the big screen, when just a decade ago, we couldn't do that.
Videogame films can do the same thing, right now we have Ratchet & Clank, Warcraft, Assassin's Creed and The Last of Us in development, and one day we could see Uncharted, Halo, Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid, Playstation Heroes, Shadow of the Colossus as movies and not have them be dead on arrival. All it takes is one, one videogame movie to be amazing and really show what videogame movies are capable of and it won't be a genre that people would say Wreck-It Ralph is the best videogame movie just because of a technicality.
-Danny
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