LogFAQs > #955937875

lihlih posted...

Like it baffles me that so many video game films barely or sometimes have nothing to do with the source material.

It's because most film directors have an innate sense of superiority and pretentious dismissal of "video games" as anything worthwhile, so they always feel like they can "improve" video game stories.

But most directors also have an overinflated sense of their own worth, so the things they come up with often wind up being worse than what they started with.

It also doesn't help when Hollywood execs will say things like "Hey, throw a giant robot spider in the movie" in an attempt to put their own stamp on things, without regard to how it relates to the story being told.

It's the same problem comic book movies have always had. It's rare that you find a filmmaker that actually cares about/likes the source material enough to try and tell the story in a way that reflects well on the original story, as opposed to trying to dismissively do their own thing.

And even beyond that, video games have a problem that books and comics don't - which is, the narrative structure of "interactive storytelling" is different from a normal story, and there are elements of it that won't effectively translate into a linear story. A story that works in a 10-hour game that mostly consists of the player shooting aliens isn't necessarily going to work in a 2-hour movie.



lihlih posted...

What's the point of making a video game film if you're going to change everything about it?

It's because the only thing they care about is the name recognition. The idea being that you can get fans of the game to go see the movie no matter what the movie is like, because they're already fans of the brand.

That's a much less successful strategy in modern times with Twitter and the Internet in general allowing for instance movie-reviews (and pre-release leaks giving away large parts of a movie's premise/plot even before anyone spends a single dime), so audiences can avoid shitty films like the plague regardless of branding, deceptive trailers, or marketing hype - but it takes a long time for that sort of awareness to percolate through the brains of Hollywood execs. Especially since most of them don't even remotely give a shit about whether or not a movie is good as long as it can make money (if not in the US, then at least in China).
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