Video games as movies

[Meganium]

ITT: Borderlands movie

In the past decade or so, we've seen a surge of popular video games being adapted as theatrical releases. Some were really good, while others were made so poorly you question the director and the production team that made said movie.

Recently, this past weekend. Borderlands came out in theatres (at least here in the U.S., not sure worldwide). And the reviews are in -- it did poorly at the box office. As someone who played the games, I found myself disappointed about it!

In this thread, we'll discuss video game movies in general.

Some questions (no need to answer them all!)
Why do you think some video game-inspired movies were made poorly?
If you were the director, where would you improve in the movie (whether good or bad)?
In your opinion, what is the best video game movie made of all time? Worst movie?
What video game would you like to see as a movie? (or TV show??)

 

[Zeostar]

I don't plan on watching borderlands, but I'm still disappointed in the reception. I think we were starting to reach a point of video game adaptations being generally liked and accepted. So seeing this is like two steps backwards.

The building blocks to make a good adaptation have been laid out. I think most fans just want something faithful from the source material. It's not that much different than a book adaptation. I don't know why so many companies struggle at this.

 

[Juno]

I think the general opinion has been that out of touch Hollywood people see a popular thing and they want to cash in on it without learning the source material properly, and that's usually why a lot of them are bad?

I'm going to be honest though, I don't think I've seen a lot of them so I can't comment too much, they just usually look kinda bad and I'm not interested lol, unless they look SO bad and weird I want to watch it because of that, like I'll probably watch the Minecraft movie at some point when it comes out because of how strange it is.

I also think maybe the way video games are can't be adapted to a linear movie that well because a lot of video games is meandering and exploring environments and absorbing the story through being in it and it's hard to capture that in a movie. They're also a lot longer than a movie so it's hard to fit into the time restraints of one as well.

But sometimes I just don't know what the problem is - I think TV shows should do much better because they have more time, but I also didn't think The Last of Us was that good, and I thought the Fallout show was downright terrible. And like Zeo said, the building blocks are all there so I don't know why the story was so bad in Fallout, you have all the worldbuilding and lore at your disposal, just... write a decent 15-hour story using that world that's already built for you and a lot of fans are familiar with.

The Last of Us was not bad at all, it's probably one of the best video game adaptations I've seen - I think for me personally it's just that the video game already did such a good job portraying the story and characters it felt a bit unneeded, but that's not that much of a criticism, I just didn't personally enjoy it that much because I liked the cutscenes in the game more, and the show was essentially just a complete retelling of the same events and scenes with different people in (in some cases) less believable backdrops, with less action because again, you're not in the world anymore, just watching it, and a few bonus scenes. But it was faithful because they actually worked with Neil and you can tell they care about the source material, for what it's worth, and I will be watching season 2 (it's filming in my city like right now!!)

 

[Arcaneum]

Time constraints, not studying the source material properly or ignoring it altogether, poor casting choices, catering it more to the audience of general moviegoers as opposed to the audience of people who actually consume the IP's content.

We've definitely seen great adaptations (The Last of Us, Witcher, Tomb Raider etc.) and it is a shame that Borderlands has done as poorly as it has. The universe itself has enough lore to put something together, hell it could probably pull a few movies/series from it for sure, and now that's kinda down the toilet because this was just made by people that did not care like AT ALL.

Another example of a flop is the live-action Street Fighter movie with JCVD/Kylie etc. in. Absolutely terrible and most of that was because the people actually had no idea about the games themselves (I believe this was the one where the stunt coordinator knew literally 0 of the moves) and was honestly imo mostly carried by the fact JCVD was in it and therefore you're just going to expect generic CQC-filled movie 101.

I'd kill for like an actual good FF movie tbh (ideally 8 or 9) so that we can ignore Spirits Within forever and ever.

 

[Hermione Granger]

I'll give Borderlands a shot once it comes to digital and I don't think the cast is to bad, I'm sure they tried their best with what was given to them. I'll probably have a good time with it because I like a good cheese movie every now and then and I think Borderlands will fit perfectly i that category.

Though I'm more willing to give an adaption a shot, the worst adaption that I watched was Doom that starred The Rock, but I still enjoyed it for what it was. One game that is being made into a movie that I personally will see challenges adapting perfectly is Until Dawn and I honestly don't expect that movie to be as good as the game. My personal favorite use of an IP was the Resident Evil movies even if they weren't faithful to the games, but I enjoyed the action scenes in those movies.

I also don't think movie adaptions of games are ever as good as their source material. TV series adaptions tend to be the better way to go since you can give more time to the plot if your adapting the same story as the game, which The Last of Us tv series did a good job of adapting the video games while expanding on some characters.