With today's entertainment, stories are being told through many different mediums. Film, books, and video games are all taking the entertainment world by force. For every successful film based on a beloved book series, someone goes and tries to make a movie based on a poplar game franchise. These attempts have fallen short nearly every time. Movies like Mortal Kombat shed some light on these adaptations, but movies like these are a rarity.
Following the little success Mortal Kombat had with critics, though loved by most audiences and fans of the games, they decide to make a sequel. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation proved to be one of those bad sequels that tarnished the game to movie industry.
Why is it so difficult to make these types of movies? Book adaptations are typically very successful with titles like Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. When it comes to making a movie based on popular video games, they tend to never work out.
This trend is beginning to take a turn. Directors have noticed what is done right by these movies and what is done terribly wrong. This genre is the laughing stock of the film community, but there are a few titles coming out in 2016 that are aiming to change that. Warcraft, Rachet & Clank, and Assassin’s Creed are just a few of the upcoming films that are aiming to change audiences and critics opinions alike.
With Warcraft (based on the popular game franchise Warcraft by Blizzard), many people are skeptical because the stories told within the games are some of the best in the gaming industry and it’s difficult to take such a large scope of lore and put it into a two hour cinema adventure. This struggle which happens to most of these movies is why they typically do badly, the stories never make sense to stray too far away from the original source material. Warcraft’s story is closely following the beginning times when humans first made contact with the orcs as they did in the games, with familiar characters making appearances.
Now story is normally a problem director’s deal with, the next big problem is getting everyone on board. Not only do you need to have producers and marketers that see your image, but actors who can accurately portray these characters that many people have spent countless hours with. Many of these movies are plagued with actors who take their game character and add the wrong spin to them or that the director decides to take a character in a different direction that doesn’t quite fit within the game’s universe.
The major problem with most of these movies though is opening it up to all audiences. Yes they will have their dedicated followers who will fanboy over every trailer, but expanding it to people who have never even played the game can be difficult. So in the attempt to target a broader audience, the movie loses a large amount of substance or cut’s certain aspects to appeal to a larger group.
Overall movies based on video games are trying to make their way in the cinema world just like comic book movies have done so successfully. In the next coming years with the advancements in the movie industry and the deeper more emotion driven stories being told by games, I believe they will soon become the next big hit for moviegoers.
