Earlier this week, Sony Pictures released the first full trailer for their upcoming movie Uncharted, which is based on a wildly successful video game franchise that included four games and has sold over 40 million copies worldwide. At first glance, this project would seem to be almost guaranteed to succeed. The Uncharted games have a huge fanbase and feature compelling storylines and characters that could be easily transferred onto the big screen. Moreover, the movie has a large budget and features big-name stars like Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. However, if Uncharted becomes a hit at the box office it would be the exception for video game adaptations, not the rule.
Assassins Creed, for example, was released in 2016, was based on an even more successful video game franchise, also featured big-name actors, and ended up losing tens of millions of dollars at the box office. Other recent adaptations, like Tomb Raider or Mortal Kombat, at least broke even but were far from hits. Even adaptations that did fairly well in terms of sales, such as Warcraft and Angry Birds, generally receive poor reviews from audiences and critics.
The lack of both critical and commercial success enjoyed by video game movies becomes even more puzzling when considering the many successful movie-to-video game adaptations. From Goldeneye 007, To Star Trek, To Star Wars Battlefront, There Have been some wildly successful movie-to-game Adaptations throughout the years. So what is it about turning a game into a movie that is so difficult?
Some of the difficulting in adapting video games seem to come down to poor decisions made by production teams, such as trying to cram in a storyline that unfolds over hours of gameplay into a two hour long movie, or significantly altering the game’s storyline when adapting it for the big screen. However, I think the largest obstacle in adapting a video game is that video game storylines are not actually very compelling. Instead, video game storylines become compelling and immersive because they allow the user to interact with the story. When you remove the interactive aspect from a video game story, it becomes far less compelling.
As someone who really enjoyed playing some of the Uncharted games, I hope director Ruben Fleischer can buck the trend of failed video-game movies, but I can’t say I am overly optimistic about his chances.
Sources
- https://superjumpmagazine.com/why-are-video-game-movies-so-bad-aada229d0962
- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-12-11-uncharted-series-sales-passes-41-million
- https://screenrant.com/video-game-films-box-office-successes/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncharted_(film)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games
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Interesting post Zachary! I have often pondered about this in the past and came to the same conclusion as yours, albeit my explanation for this differs from yours.
In my opinion, movies as a form of entertainment tend to be more popular than videogames in general and often reach much larger and diverse audiences, thus creating a large fan base. Thereafter, when such a movie gets adapted into a videogame, the movie fans along with the film industry (with deep pockets) tend to create hype around the game even before it gets released. Lastly, it is also quite plausible (in my opinion) that after such a movie-based game is released in the market, its sales will tend to skyrocket due to the immediate support it might receive from purchases made not only by gamers but also due to such a game’s ability to tap into the non-gamer community as a market – who might simply purchase the game in order to relive the scenes from their favorite movie.