Robbie COLLIN
Robbie Collin looks at Hollywood’s most idiotic (and dogged) obsession
When I was at the Tokyo Film Festival in 2014, an opportunity for an interview came up that would have made my 10-year-old heart pop with excitement. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario video-game franchise, had made himself available to talk to The Daily Telegraph at a towering Lost in Translation-like hotel in the city. Miyamoto’s standing in videogame culture is hard to overstate: in cinematic terms, think George Méliès, John Ford, Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg rolled into one.
Among the subjects we covered was the common ground between films and video games, which in Miyamoto’s view was all but non-existent. He’d never regarded games as vehicles for storytelling, and saw the convergence of the two mediums as a cause for concern.
Of course, he has every reason to. The original video-game film, 1993’s
Super Mario Bros, was based on Miyamoto’s most beloved creation and arguably remains the worst high-profile entry in what can only be described as a competitive field. From Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to the Resident Evil series and the latest adaptation of Mortal Kombat , Hollywood’s love affair with video games has spawned many horrible monsters over the years. Yet the studios are committed to making it work. Before the year is out, a new Resident Evil reboot will have shuffled into view, followed in February by the Indiana Jones-like Uncharted, with Tom Holland.
A new CG Mario is in production. Films based on such mighty gaming properties as Metal Gear Solid, Gears of War, Ghost of Tsushima and even Space Invaders – the bloopy one from 1978 – are all currently in development. Why? Because the studios regard games in the same way they do superheroes: as a vast cache of dizzyingly popular source material that could yield decades of profit, if they can only work out how to unlock it. With superheroes, the formula took a few decades to refine. With games, you might generously say it remains a work in progress. The original Super Mario Bros film’s downfall stemmed in part from its makers’ determination to replace Miyamoto’s cheerful, candy-coloured Mushroom Kingdom setting with the dark and sinister city of Dinohattan – and with that, the only distinctive, non-gameplay-related facet of the Mario experience was lost. Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, would later describe it as “the worst thing I ever did” and the film was enough of a bomb to dissuade anyone from attempting another big-budget adaptation until the end of the decade, when the cross-generational success of Sony’s Playstation had brought about an uptick in games featuring more “mature” (for which read gory or sexualised) content. This second generation of video-game films began in 2001 with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
It was 15-rated, featured a marketably sexy girl-power-era heroine and had been spun off from a game series that riffed heavily on cinema, especially the Indiana Jones trilogy (again). It was poorly reviewed, but took £200 million worldwide – not much less than the first X-men film – earning itself a sequel and making a mainstream star of Angelina Jolie.
Yet the Tomb Raider films and their contemporaries – the likes of Doom, Silent Hill, Hitman and Max Payne – were so set on titillation, bad language and violence that no-one took them seriously as a cultural force.
This was not a mistake the third and current generation of video-game films would repeat. Beginning with Disney’s Prince of Persia in 2010, mainstream blockbusters were now the model – though living up to them turned out to be harder than it looked. Warcraft was faithful to its source material, and came out like a textureless Tolkien knock-off as a result: it set a new boxoffice record for game adaptations but still lost money because it had cost so much to make.
Yet the recent commercially successful cinematic takes on Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu and Rampage suggest that the elusive winning formula may have begun to emerge. Rather than attempting to adapt the above games in any meaningful sense, Hollywood simply strip-mined them for branded mascots to cram into tried-and-tested formats. Sonic was essentially a CG buddy comedy in the vein of Hop and Alvin and the Chipmunks; Detective Pikachu a sly reworking of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Nearly three decades on from Mario, it’s now the audience’s turn to be played.