Why are video game movies bad?
There’s little doubt that films based on video games have struggled, sometimes commercially and almost always critically. In 1993, “Super Mario Bros.” got the genre off on the wrong foot, and from there, the bombs kept coming: Head-to-head fighting games, first-person narrative-heavy adventures and even racing simulators have been turned into mediocre or worse movies. German director and writer Uwe Boll, who is best known for challenging his critics to boxing matches, may be the biggest villain, having made several video game adaptations that finished with scores from review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes of under 10 percent.
So with “Rampage,” based on the 1986 game and starring Dwayne Johnson, opening next weekend, moviegoers return to a consistent question: Why hasn’t there been a truly breakout box office hit and critical darling to come from the video-game-to-movie pipeline?
It may come down to numbers: In a normal year, only a couple of video game films hit theaters, and with the genre being just 25 years old, it could be that the right match between the demands of the adapted property and the people involved hasn’t been found yet.
“It’s not because it’s a game,” says Danny Bilson, a screenwriter, game writer and chairman of the Interactive and Games Division of USC’s John Wells Division of Writing for Screen and Television. “It’s just that the right talent with the right inspiration hasn’t been put towards one of those games. It’s hard to make a great movie.”
There are challenges that are unique to adapting a video game, though. Movie watching is a passive activity, while playing a game is active; the person holding the controller is also the person determining how the story will progress. Turning a game into a film changes the nature of the experience.
“What you’re taking away is the one-on-one engagement that the player has with the game,” says John Zinman, a screenwriter who helped write 2001’s “Lara Craft: Tomb Raider.” “If you’ve got a really rich story that the player is actively engaged in, then you take them to a movie where they’re passive, it’s somehow less satisfying.”
When that engagement is lost, the film has to fall back on the story and the characters. And although video games today can be very cinematic, their plots are there to serve a larger master.
“The story and those characters are built to support interactivity and progression” through a game’s levels, says Bilson. “They’re not built primarily to engage an audience sitting in their chair in a passive experience.”
Characters also can be difficult to adapt. The lead character of a video game has to operate somewhat like a cipher, giving the player the freedom to infuse the onscreen avatar with a piece of his or her own personality. Remove the player from the equation, and the game’s central persona can feel empty.
“I don’t think (the adaptations) get very personal with the charac-
ters,” says Patrick Massett, Zinman’s writing partner. “They don’t take them, for some reason, to that other level of believability and realism, while other action movies kind of get (them) there.”
Of course, not every video game adaptation comes with an obvious story attached. “Rampage,” for instance, is based on a game that had players control mutant monsters, with the mission of flattening a city by punching buildings into dust. Surprisingly enough, having so little to work with might make the process of adapting it for the big screen easier, though that type of narrative freedom means the screenwriter has much more to do.
“Now, there are games that are very narrative-heavy and have complex lore. But back when we were doing ‘Tomb Raider,’ there wasn’t that much,” Zinman says. “There was a biography of Lara Croft and a history with her father. There were these little kernels that we thought were important to pay homage to for the fan base. … (But) story-wise, we felt completely liberated to do what we wanted.”
“On the easy side, (Croft) was a pretty specific character,” adds Massett. “There was no world, stories or narrative that we had to build out, but she was pretty specific, and different.”
When (or if ?) Hollywood gets it right, though, and makes a video game adaption that appeals to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, it will be easy to spot both in box office numbers and critical notices.
“The people who love the (game) intellectual property love it because of the experiential nature of it,” Bilson says. “And if you do it at a super high quality, (the fans) are going to be there, but so will everybody else, because it’s a great movie with a great story and great characters.”
Robert Spuhler is a Los Angeles freelance writer.