When will there actually be good video game movies?

Ever since Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon received Hollywood film adaptations that met with financial flops and critical scorn, video game movies have a reputation of being inferior to the video game source materials on which they are based with very few to no exceptions. Fans who are most familiar with that sort of reputation are sure to remember how the first Mortal Kombat movie tipped the tides of video games movies a little bit, how the Resident Evil films managed to get away with profits in spite of numerous negative reviews among critics and fans, and how Uwe Boll's filmography of House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and Bloodrayne left the foulest of tastes in the mouths of audiences who have seen them. Such movies were so bad that numerous top 10 lists have been made to determine the worst of the worst, like what WatchMojo and GameTrailers did for their lists. So why do movies based on video games tend to suck?

Less than 10 years ago, I chose that question as the basis of a PowerPoint topic as part of a special college program designed to teach disabled people similar to myself the use of Microsoft Office software, basic job skills, and work etiquette. Titled Movies Based on Video Games: A Dark and Tasteless History, I came up with the following answers as to why video games movies tend to fail critically and financially:

1. Bland storylines
2. Uninteresting characters
3. Focus more on blood, gore, sex, and violence at random
4. People who made them are not video game players or fans of video games
5. Movie plots don't follow the video games
6. Hollywood focuses far more on making movies based on bestselling novels and comic books than on making movies based on video games

(On a sidenote, I mentioned that the only good movies based on video games came from Japan in the form of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Street Fighter II: V, and Night Warriors: Darkstalkers Revenge, all based on two popular fighting game franchises developed and produced by Capcom, going so far as to state they are superior the American-made feature films.)

Some recent YouTube videos and Internet articles have offered various answers this question. A few recent examples include an IGN article on a panel at a San Diego Comic-Con panel a few years ago called 'Video Games to Movies: Is the Golden Age Upon Us?', a YouTube video by The Game Theorists in June of last year, another video by Extra Credits, and a GameSpot article from a few months ago. A majority of those answers fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Video games and movies are just different mediums in terms of experience; player interaction for video games as opposed to passive audience viewing for movies being a key difference.
2. The filmmakers responsible for those video-game-to-film adaptations were not really trying because they have no passion or respect for the source material.
3. The original developers of the games those movies have been based on were never really involved in the film-making process or have failed to invest in creating scripts.
4. A majority of Hollywood studio executives are unfamiliar with video games since they are accustomed to reading readily-made scripts.
5. Hollywood film studios, especially ones run by the most influential people in the industry tend to focus on making films based on some of the best-selling video game series via the brand name alone. Therefore, profits made from box-office sales are their main concern regardless of the films' quality and critical reception.

All of those arguments, combined with my PowerPoint answers, are, for the most part, correct. But perhaps the most concrete answer to date was given by Joey Ansah (well known as the writer and director of the 2010 YouTube fan film Street Fighter: Legacy, the successful mini series Street Fighter: Assassin's Fist, and the recent mini series Street Fighter: Resurrection) in an interview given by Gamespot in mid-March when asked about this topic:

I have a detailed and informative answer for you. You've got to look at the business of film-making. In a utopian world, any of these being converted into motion picture on a big scale, whether it be a Batman, Street Fighter, Halo, whatever, you would always assume and hope that whoever it is at the studio who greenlights this that there's someone working at the company that says, "I am the biggest Halo fan, I know everything about this universe, let's make this film. Because I know what makes the gamers tick, and I have a vision for how we can convert this to live-action on screen."

But it doesn't work like that. A studio or production company sees that a game has just grossed X amount of millions, and has this big a fan base, and they do some exploring and find that the live-action rights are up for grabs. So they purchase those rights and say, let's just do a four [million budget] movie. Let's just get a director who has just done something similar… let's get a Fast and Furious director, tick. Is he a fan of the game, does he know the game? No, doesn't matter. Did his last film make a lot of money? Yeah, that's what matters. What young up-and-coming cast can we get? Do they know the game, are they martial artists? No, doesn't matter, we'll just stunt doubles. They just go down a checklist like this and they'll bang it out there.

 That is why these films are so awful. Because the inception of the idea to making it is never being driven by someone who knows the property inside-out and has a strong vision for it. There are examples where it does work--Zack Snyder's 300, clearly a massive fan of Frank Miller's work. The fact that he had Frank Miller on set consulting, shows his reverence to the source material. That graphic novel has been represented on film almost frame for frame, panel to panel. I think that film was a great triumph. Nolan and his Batman films, he's a self-confessed Batman fan. So there are examples where it does work. But more often than not, that's not the case.

Now what does all this mean for the future of video game movies? It has recently been said that this year will be the beginning to better adaptations of video games in a surge similar to comic book movies of the past decade. So far, reality proved to differ. On April 29, an animated film adaptation of Ratchet & Clank, a well-known series dating back to the PlayStation 2, was released in theaters. Although some of the original voice actors, like James Arnold Taylor as Ratchet and David Kaye as Clank, and T.J. Fixman, a former senior writer from Insomniac Games, were directly involved, it was not well received by critics (it earned a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 29 score on Metacritic) and lost $10 dollars in the competition with Disney's Zootopia and a reboot of The Jungle Book; the Playstation 4 reboot released a few weeks earlier, on the other hand, was far better received (it earned a critical review score of 86 based on 91 critics and a user score of 8.6 based on 839 ratings). The Angry Birds Movie, based on the multi-billion dollar phone app game franchise dating back to 2009, has received less than average reviews even before it's appearance in theaters yesterday as of this writing; one reviewer even went so far as to give his review the title 'Angry Birds is Over.' And in a recent bizarre turn of events, it was announced that Threshold Entertainment Group CEO Larry Kasanoff and a Chinese firm named Seven Star Works had made a deal to form Threshold Global Studios in an effort to produce an $80 million "epic sci-fi thriller" based on, of all things, Tetris, as the first part of a trilogy. It remains to be seen if the films based on Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft series and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise will fair better once they hit theaters later this year. Ubisoft claimed that its film will break the cycle of video game film mediocrity, but it cannot be said with absolute certainty.

In conclusion, this year may not be the start of the golden age of video game movies as some may have hoped. That may happen in the next five years or so. But that depends on how its going to be done by the filmmakers and how much passion those filmmakers have for video games. Maybe they will strike gold just like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy and Marvel's The Avengers did in the past. Until the time comes, it would be best to stick playing the video games as well as reading and watching online fan fiction based on them.