"More intensity, Alec, or the stunt double gets your love scene."

THQ has announced a new “trans-media” strategy for turning their biggest games into blockbuster movie titles. First on the list, it seems, is the open world sci-fi epic Red Faction.

But hold on for just a second. Don’t video games make terrible, terrible movies? Oh yes.

The complete list is long, but let’s revisit just some of the most notable flops and failures in the movie-game bracket:

Super Mario Bros.
Double Dragon
Street Fighter
Max Payne
Dead or Alive
Doom
Wing Commander

Boy, did these movies blow chunks.

As far as the successes go, you would probably put the first Resident Evil in there, and there’s no doubting the commercial success of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. Supposedly, Silent Hill was quite the enjoyable fright fest on celluloid. Mortal Kombat? Good fight flick, let’s leave it at that.

The paucity of winners, and the overwhelming number of losers in this market is surprising. Games make a lot of money. Far more than the music industry, to give you some idea. It stands to reason that developers could be making a little more by expanding their franchises into film. How come then, that Halo was never filmed, as planned, by Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson? Why has Gears of War, one of the most popular franchises of the “next-gen” console era, had its budget slashed and lost its director?

A reminder: we are still climbing out of a recession. People with money are very careful about parting with it nowadays, especially when approaching business proposals which have failed miserably in the past (see Super Mario Bros.). But our enquiry doesn’t end there. Movies are still being made in Hollywood, some of them based on video games. Many of them will fail.

Turn this into a movie. I dare ya.

Is there, perhaps, something fundamentally challenging about turning an interactive media experience into a passive one? If Marcus Fenix is getting his ass kicked by the Locust in a movie, the most we can do is toss popcorn at the screen in frustration. In a game, however, we would whip out the chainsaw, pronto. Having the freedom of the latter replaced by a neverending cutscene is limiting, no matter how entertaining. Not to mention: difficult to write. The Hollywood script monkeys responsible for video game adaptations have an extremely difficult job on their hands. Staying true to a story which millions of people have experienced in vastly different ways has to be harder than finishing God of War on God difficulty. Woe betide the poor bastard who has to storyboard – wait for it – the long awaited Sims movie.

Ah, Kratos. He, as always, makes the impossible seem possible. Many players of the God of War trilogy have observed that it plays “like a movie”. Indeed, the history of linear, tightly scripted games is a long one, but it is only recently that video games have begun to match the visual spectacle of blockbuster movies.

Nathan's got the look.

The action sequences (and below the belt banter) in Uncharted 2 are as good as any middle-of-the-road action flick. Crucially, the experience as a whole is more fun. With a rigidly linear plot and a likeable cast of attractive, witty characters like Nathan Drake, Uncharted is practically begging to be made into a film. But riddle me this: if steering Nathan through countless dangers with an analogue stick is more satisfactory, feels more complete than watching Channing Tatum do the same on screen, why would you want to?

by Niel Bekker