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Video Games as Movies

Uwu_Oocoo2

Joy is in video games and colored pencils
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With the surprising success of the Sonic movies, more ideas and plans for video game based movies are being tossed around. First there's the upcoming Mario movie made by Illumination. Now, there's plans for there to possibly be a Pac Man movie in a couple years. If those go well we can probably count on seeing more movies based on various franchises in the future. And obviously some series would work better than others, I don't think we'll be getting a new Pong adventure any time soon. Do you guys have any games or game series you feel would work well in a movie format? Personally, I think seeing Metroid as a full film would be really cool.

(Btw, just throwing the idea out there that they should have a whole MCU scenario where they make movies for every major franchise and then they all come together for Smash Bros the Movie.)
 

mαrkαsscoρ

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it's always tough b/c the series you'd think would work great as movies just....don't, I know we're passed the days of the street fighter movie but there's still a lot that just come and go like assassins creed or uncharted

anyways, there was an animation promo for gravity rush 2 and it would be so sick if that were a full blown movie

 

Bowsette Plus-Ultra

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Tangent on the video game movie:

Structurally, video games and movies are very different. There are things that just work in video games that would be awful in movies. Wandering around a temple in a Legend of Zelda game can be fun because the player is actively engaging with the task at hand, while seeing someone repeat the same section in cinema would be less eventful than Fi's character development in Skyward Sword.

Bad video game movies fail because they're just trying to be the games they're trying to adapt. Stuff like the recent Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and Prince of Persia films fail because they're just shallow attempts to copy the games they're adapting. Heck, you can almost see the QTE prompts pop up in the Tomb Raider film. They're not taking advantage of the medium they're in, they're just trying to appeal to fans already familiar with the franchise; the film equivalent of jingling keys in your face and saying, "Look! It's that thing you like!"

Good video game adaptations take advantage of the fact that they're films or TV shows and not video games. Stuff like Arcane, Castlevania, Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, and The Witcher are as good as they are because they aren't trying to just be the source material. The bad ones are bad because they're just trying to be the source material.

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There are quite a few series I think could be adapted well. Metroid is the sort of game I'd write as a space western revenge story in which a cold and vengeful Samus hunts down the creature that wiped out her colony. The Legend of Zelda could be a dark fantasy in where hope reemerges alongside whispers about a boy in green that stepped through time.

I think Mass Effect would be suited to a television show, one of those limited series things with the intention to tell a finite story over a longer medium.

It's a more niche thing, but Greedfall is a cool colonial fantasy setting about the people of a plague-ridden fantasy British Empire seeking out a cure in the fantasy new world. It's a broad setting with fantastical creatures and a unique style that I think would be a good vehicle for a TV show.
 

Chevywolf30

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We were supposed to get the Minecraft movie already, there was a release date announced a few years back for sometime in early 2022 but that obviously never happened and I wish it had.
 

Bowsette Plus-Ultra

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We were supposed to get the Minecraft movie already, there was a release date announced a few years back for sometime in early 2022 but that obviously never happened and I wish it had.

Minecraft: Storymode was ported to Netflix, since most Telltale games are already movies. Does that count? ;)
 

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