Is 2016 the year that will finally put movies based on games on the map and away from the brink of mediocrity and ridicule?
Historically movies based on games don’t have a good track record. I was looking at a list of gaming inspired movies on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games). None of them score high, but for me, of the 32 released international theatrical movies, I thought six of them were pretty good*:
- Mortal Kombat
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
- Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
- Resident Evil (the many sequels were fun action romps, but not good movies)
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Honorable mention is the Street Fighter movie, which is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does remain one of my top guilty-pleasure movies of all time. It’s just so campy.
But these movies are all in the past! Surely we can finally do better? Well, we’re getting four gaming movies this year, two of them animated and two live-action (as much live-action as you’re going to get in a CG-rich environment like the Warcraft movie).
The animated ones, which I haven’t seen yet, are:
- Ratchet and Clank
- Angry Birds
They don’t seem to be doing so well with critics, but while they do garner some better reviews from regular viewers it’s clear these are not the poster children for gaming movie successes. Pity.
Next week the first of two live-action gaming inspired movies is going to premiere in cinemas**: Warcraft, the Movie. Then at the end of the year we’re getting Assassin’s Creed. Will either of these two movies do what Batman Begins and Ironman did for superhero movies and finally take this genre into good-movie territory? I really, really hope so. While there were some good superhero movies before Batman Begins, such as Blade, a lot of them were duds. After Batman Begins and Ironman though most turned out to be really good movies, with only the occasional dud like Fantastic Four. I want this to happen for gaming movies as well, because there are a lot of games I would love to see turned into movies, like The Last of Us or Mass Effect.
Right now I do have a couple concerns for Warcraft, based on what I saw in the trailers:
- Overabundance of CG: The trailer looked pretty good, hopefully that will translate well into the movie.
- Warcraft’s bigger-than-life cartoon-style: Warcraft is known for its cartoony style, such as really huge armor sets and the like. The movie seems to go the same route, which on the one hand I like because it pays homage to the source material, but I fear it might make the soldiers look laughable.
- Simple plot: With all the CG I’m reminded of Avatar, which looked absolutely brilliant but story-wise was basically Pocahontas. I’ve stayed away from spoilers, save from the trailers, so I hold out hope for the plot to be more than two enemies uniting in the face of a greater bad guy (BvS, I’m looking at you).
*) Your mileage may vary.
**) Where I live at least.