Game-To-Film Adaptation, Do We Need It?

The tipping point for me was last Friday, seeing the news of Gran Turismo getting a prospective movie. The 67th (I made that number up) adaptation of a game that unequivocally does not need one. Over the past year (maybe even two) we’ve seen the repeated announcements of Fallout, BioShock, and otherwise going to one of the equally abundant streaming services or to cinemas by 2030. Sonic, Mario, another Resident Evil franchise of films and shows, Horizon Zero Dawn, and you name it, all either out now/soon or arriving on your screens in the coming years.

The question I want to ask is rather quite simple: Do we need them? Of course, I am not just talking about the Gran Turismo movie that is reportedly in the works, but the whole thing, every coming game-to-film/screen adaptation you’ve seen rumored or announced. Adaptation isn’t a new venture, though some believe it is with the popularity of Marvel’s many characters and DC doing yet another casting of Batman for its 98th franchise of a man who wears his black pajamas to punch people. Cinderella and Snow White were children’s stories before films, and Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster were the leads in books before movies. M*A*S*H was a book before it was a movie and a movie before it was turned into an endless foray of TV episodes.

You’ve heard it time and time again from fans of books and comics, as they almost never stack up to the original medium. The adaptation of another medium’s work is the showcase of such a dependency by big-budget studios in the film industry and on what many snobbish critics decree as lesser mediums of art. Big-budget studios are dependent on the work of others, not because they lack imagination, but lack the gut to take risks on wholly original ideas simply because we (the audience) won’t turn out to them. The reason Tom Cruise is in every action part, the reason Chris Pratt is cast in comedy roles, and the reason Margot Robbie is in everything is that we don’t turn out to see anyone else.

The film industry is built on archetypes for roles and established franchises for the blockbuster flicks for that very reason. Video games are just en vogue right now for transformation into the wholly un-interactive medium of film and tv. Games are little more than a fresh well to plunge into for established franchises, and thus an orthodoxical audience that will return any investment, resulting in sweeping announcements of Sony’s entire catalog coming to a screen near you. Will they all make it to the big picture? No, that’s the trouble with these hastily made announcements and rumors. Many of these will be dropped before a script is finalized, some once casting is done, and a few as filming begins.

So I return to my question, are they required? To make the game franchise popular, probably not. However, it is required to make both the IP (intellectual property) holder and film studio money. They are businesses, there are people dependent on those businesses to make money so they can feed their families (not just the actors), and they are going to go with the safest option to stay in business, that’s the flat tax of it. With all of this said, a majority of these franchises being adapted to either the big or little (4K 72-inch LCD HDR) screen don’t need films or shows at all.

I am not saying this to gatekeep. It is simply the medium from which the stories originate that dictates this. Unless you do a lot of laying pipe (in industry terms) deviating from the original story to varying degrees, film audiences wouldn’t know what is going on. Yet in doing so, hardcore established fans are turned off. Despite the attempts of David Cage and the likes of the Uncharted series, video games are a wholly interactive experience conditional on you (the player) overcoming the challenge. Spec Ops: The Line would be a far different experience if you weren’t controlling Conrad.

With no actual story in view, your only goal in Gran Turismo was to win races and make money, so how do you make that an established series people want to see in the cinema? The interactive aspect of games like Spec Ops, The Last of Us, BioShock, and others can’t go ignored when talking about their impact on you, the player, or as you will soon be described, the viewer. “Would you kindly?” is important for BioShock because you decide whether or not to continue playing, just as the moment in Spec Ops when you press the button is your decision to persist. How do you get the fallen human in an Undertale film to delete the file in the config folder without doing something stupid like making it Wreck-it-Ralph or The Matrix?

Of course, the film and TV industry wasn’t the first to cannibalize the other side. Video games had been making adaptations all throughout the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. South Park for the N64 and Spider-Man 2 with its wonderful swinging. Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong got a game adaptation, as did The Simpsons, multiple times. Was it right to adapt the Michael Bay 2007 Transformers to games? No, and the concept for 2013’s pile of third-person JJ-Trek that slopped out of The Darkness II‘s developer, Digital Extremes, should have been put inside a cannon and fired into the heart of the sun. Nonetheless, any game critic that claims their field is greater than all else could use five minutes away from the horrid smell of Doritos and Mountain Dew.

By all means, film and tv should tackle stories such as underwater art-deco cities built on utopian desires of isolationism or a parent losing their child to find an adoptive child he begrudgingly falls in love with. Film and TV could also tackle whatever Horizon Zero Dawn is supposed to be. Tell those stories and explore different ideas. Regardless of that, I don’t think you need either the established name or pressure of fans clamoring for, as Blake Snyder put it, “the same, but different.” How many zombie films and shows did we see following the success of the first three seasons of The Walking Dead? Meanwhile: Andromeda, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Stargate, all came after Star Trek, and all but Battlestar came after Star Wars.

There are a billion and one different ways to do something. Yet I’ve not seen many shows or films about deep water societies collapsing. There is an upcoming Portal film, yet I’ve not seen a single movie outside of horror exploring corporations testing an individual as they complete puzzles and get tormented by a witty robot. I would comment on the upcoming Rabbids film, but Minions: The Rise of Gru (Minions 2) releases in July. Just Dance is going to be Save the Last Dance with Lady Gaga. If Streets of Rage isn’t They Live again with the reanimated corpse of Roddy Piper punching people to death I’ll be upset, and do you really care about the rest of the already announced adaptations?

The point I am trying to make is that you can create something new, but you don’t need to slap an established title on it to make your money. Though, EA, if you want to give me a call, I’ve got an idea for a Sims adaptation that we can shop around. Joking aside, where do we stop? A live-action Space Invaders movie has already been announced, which will go down like Freddie Prinze Jr’s 1999 Wing Commander. Despite the success of Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego, since 1991, rumors have flown of live-action films. Particularly, one from Disney set to star Sandra Bullock and one in 2011 rumored to star Jennifer Lopez, none of which have developed enough to the filming stage.

If the story is not begging to be told in that medium, why are we adapting it with such strong-headedness? Use it as a template and explore a way to make it different. Instead of doing Oceans 24 with an all-female cast or Ghostbusters: Male Ghosts are All Criminals Because of this Casting, take the core concept and flip it on its head. To be clear, use all the established film franchises you want, just make it a story that needs to be told in that way. Inevitably when the FTL: Faster Than Light adaptation comes, why is that story told in film or an anthology series following different ships? Adapting a Rogue-like/lite such as that would attach a definitive ending that is unneeded.

I’ve attempted to hammer this in as stiff as possible throughout the article, but so many games are simply unable to make the transition into film or tv unscathed. Burnout would be impossible, True Crime: Streets of L,A would be laughable, and Kingdom Hearts is a mess of a plot already. Deus Ex would be the work of a psycho and Dark Souls even more so, I’d rather watch paint dry than Death Stranding, and Shadow of the Colossus would lose all of its meaning. This says nothing of The Getaway, which is every Guy Ritchie film for the PS2, or Red Dead Redemption (1 & 2) being every spaghetti western ever produced.

Adapting a game into a wholly passive medium such as film and TV misplaces one of the dimensions for which we engage with the character in the first place. To do so creates this snobbish divide between the two (well, three), with those such as Blake Snyder pointing out Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider failed as a result of lacking a save the cat moment. Or quite possibly, the character does not fit the medium without changing her too much. The original lady Croft is one of the greatest characters to grace gaming alongside Trevor Philips, though I like his curves more than hers.

One of my favorite films last year, alongside The Matrix 4: Resurrection, was an original script based on the concept of video games: Free Guy. Not only because it understood the language of those who play games well enough to make references, but simply because it was a fresh idea with a big budget behind it. Looking back at the last few years, films that jump to attention are those that are the fresher ideas, the ones that don’t often get big-budget approvals. Remakes, sequels, adaptations, and “based on a true story” films end up lost in a haze of: “when did that come out?”

All of which is to say that the industry has a number of ideas. Sure they might not be as safe but often are pushed aside for the new No Man’s Sky film or sequels and remakes. It feels effortless to state, “if they don’t stay true to the story, what’s the point?” as I’m sure many thousands and millions of fans of X and Y books have said for tens of years at this point. Nevertheless, attempts to make Nathan Drake likable or slapping a story onto driving games that have none seem disingenuous to the concept of simply making an adaptation.

Ultimately, do we need another video game adaptation? No. At least not until we’ve figured out some way of maintaining the core concept while also preserving the risk-averse nature of the big-budget film industry and making good films. The lack of experimental ideas for typical films results in these adaptations falling in line as well. Tom Holland’s Uncharted is just another bland adventure flick with an established title. The one that has me most concerned is Just Cause being just another action flick following Rico instead of how it should be done. If you are adapting something, your potential audience shouldn’t feel suspicious over that decision. The truth of the 24+ announced adaptations is that I’m skeptical of nearly all of them.