No one would have predicted the domination of the box office with blockbusters based on comic book characters. The success of movies like The Avengers, Black Panther or the Christopher nolan Batman trilogy has lead to directors and movie production studios beginning to understand that the potential of transforming comic book stories for the big screen.
I recently watched a video on How Comic Book Storytelling is Changing Movies by, Patrick (H) Willems.
Patrick does a fantastic job of explaining how movies like Marvel Avengers Infinity War, and other Marvel movies, are the first to take a step towards the idea of a shared universe in movies. We are used to the idea of a shared universe in TV shows. Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad are great examples of shows that have broken from the episodic form have a running plot.
Many previous television shows had little or no running plot from season to season. It was easy to pick up any episode and not feel lost, not knowing where in the story you were. This was also true for movies. Yes, there are sequels and trilogies that share a plot and universe but Marvel was the first to live out the idea that multiple individual movies could be brought together into one collective movie. This collective movie would expect audiences to know and understand the background of each of the individuals from their own movie franchise.
It is into this environment that I think gaming novels and movies will blossom.
There have been very, very few game inspired movies that have worked well. Tomb Raider, World of WarCraft, Prince of Persia, Hit Man, Need for Speed etc… Here are just some examples of game adaptations
A recent addition to this list was Ready Player One. Im not sure people realise the importance of the Ready Player One Movie and the Novel its based on. It is RPO that really opens up the possibility for gaming based movies.
The issue with gaming movie adaptations of the past is similar to the issues with the first X-Men movies. Don't get me wrong! I love the X men movies and I will always return to watch them. However good the X-Men movies are, they are not an exact comic book adaptation. Similarly to Christopher Nolan's batman movies, the X-men movies had to be toned down from the comics, made darker and more realistic. The first 3 X-Men movies are movies based in reality that choose to adapt characters based on X-Men characters. As Patrick says in the bellow video, visually, X-Men looked more like a political thriller.
It appears that movie studios, like in the example of the original comic book movies, think that audiences don't want to see characters actually in a game. They think that audiences like the character from video games and therefore want to see these characters in their own world. What the studios don't understand is that what people enjoy about video games is playing the game, not necessarily the story inside the game. They enjoy the leveling, questing, utilising of mechanics, skill and progresion. What current movies to is to remove all of this and leave only the characters and plot. This is the reason that modern game adaptations perform only averagely in the cinema. They take what people love about games and remove it, leaving only the surface details.
It the genre of LitRPG is the saving grace of gaming movie adaptations. Movie adaptations need to not just take the characters and remove the gaming side of gaming. If you dont know what LitRPG novels are, check out my previous blog post discribing them here. A true adaptation needs to have a player as the protagonist, living inside a game with all the gaming mechanics in tact. It is only once this is tried that truly good gaming adaptations will begin.
Ready Player One was a step in the right direction but there is still a way to go. Novels like Lord of the Rings inspired table top games like D&D. D&D inspired modern day MMO games. MMO games inspire LitRPG novels. It appears as if this inspiration must go full circle and inspire a new genre of movie.