On July 9th, 2012 it was announced that Sony has begun a film adaptation for the hit Ubisoft game, Assassin's Creed. A mere 24 hours later Universal Pictures lets it be known that they will distribute the God of War movie that is now in the rewrite stage.
Excited? No? Yeah, neither are we. Video game movies have not really fared all that well as movies; Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Doom to just name a few.
Of course there is always hope.
For Assassin's Creed we have the luxury of already knowing that Michael Fassbender will be in a starring role; to what capacity is still unknown.
God of War has just hired the screenwriters behind four of the Saw films, and those weren't bad (for those that like creepy horror films).
The biggest problem video game adaptations face is that those that don't know anything about the game, need a movie to include some sort of origin story or a lot of back story information crammed into the first part of the movie. This causes the fans that have been playing these games and know everything there is to know about the characters, the locations, and accessories, to lose interest easily. So now when the movie hits the points the true fans are to be paying attention to, they've already lost interest.
So who do the studios really make video game adaptation movies for anyways? If they created movies that built onto the games instead of going back and screwing up the original content in a retelling of the story, many of these movies would be more successful and much more enjoyable to the game's fans.
Lets face it, the one movie we've all wanted to see was Halo. Do we expect it to be good, not really. Will we still go see it, you betcha.
Is there a game you'd like to see adapted to the silver screen? Do you have faith in Assassin's Creed or God of War being a success? Hit up the comments section and let us know!
-GJ
