MovieBob said:
This week MovieBob takes a look at Alad...errr...I mean Prince of Persia.
Any game that takes a large portion of their influence from movies and other media will be much easier to create than a game that get's it's influence else where because the movie of the game has essentially already been made, they just have to make it again. They have this mold from the early adventure movies and all that has to be done is fill in the characters names and perhaps shift the plot around a little bit for it to make a little more sense. Hey presto, average enough movie to sell well.
This means that a large number of modern games, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, God of War, Mass Effect, Kane and Lynch, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 (not to be confused with Far Cry which had the terrible movie made out of it), Gears of War and even Halo (which you seemed resolute in think will suck if made if I recall) could be made into decent enough movies given that they already are, pretty much movies. Stick the characters into the archetypal plot and a good enough movie exists. Have a decent enough director and writer and you can make a really good movie from lets say, Far Cry 2. Far Cry 2 borrows heavily from Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, really heavily, but sets it in a modern conflict in Africa. A writer could easily create a story about a bunch of mercs going into Africa to kill this arms dealers with many beautiful scenic shots and plenty of good enough action. Blood Diamond was a bit like this and quite good I think. Keep people like Uwe Boll away from it and any movie based game movie will do well.
Games like Mario and Zelda could also have good movies based on them, but I still think they would need to follow other movies quite closely. That picture of shopped Mario movie you made, it looks just like Avatar, the Zelda one just like Lord of The Rings so what you would be getting is a more child oriented version of those movies if they want to stick close to the games, more adult if they want to branch out further.
To be honest I'm not sure if I'll like a game-movie made to fit a different kind of movie. Zelda might be considered fantasy but it isn't Lord of the Rings fantasy, merging the two just wont work. Same with Mario.
In the future we're going to see more movie based games based movies coming out. We actually already have Kane and Lynch which will be interesting to see and I wouldn't be surprised if the Halo film gets a revival. Bioshock might be good and I have high hopes for the Mass Effect movie. Time will tell I guess.
