Video game fans are naturally suspicious of movie conversions because they’ve been burned more often than charcoal briquettes. Which is weird, because pattern recognition is meant to be a gaming skill. Columbia Pictures’ announcement that it's taking on the Metal Gear Solid license with Iron Man and The Amazing Spider-Man franchise producer Avi Arad has many gamers wary. The last attempt crashed and burned only two years ago, with Michael De Luca, producer of Oscar winner The Social Network, citing vague but fatal incompatibilities between video game companies and the big screen. But as the game's signature character Solid Snake once said: "Don't regret your past! Learn from it!" With that in mind, here are four reasons the film adaptation might actually work this time. more »
As Paul Thomas Anderson painstakingly rolls out his latest labor of love, The Master — next stop, New York City, with a 70-mm screening at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater on Tuesday night — another Paul Anderson with different middle initials — W.S. — is preparing to infect the worldwide box office like a zombie virus on Friday with Resident Evil: Retribution. It's the latest chapter in the movie franchise based on the blockbuster game franchise, which will also spawn a new installment, Resident Evil 6 on Oct. 6.
Guess which film will fare better critically? more »
Star Trek has always been about exploring the universe, finding out most of it wants to kill us — and then trying to do better. Most video games are about exactly the same thing.
It's one reason the multimedia franchise that Gene Roddenberry created in the 1960s has spawned almost as many video games as Mario. Another is that Star Trek's geek appeal pre-dates the advent of mainstream gaming. Back in 1971, fans were using their keyboards to blow up Klingon warbirds in a Star Trek text game before the graphics existed to actually depict them. more »
Movies adapted from video games are usually like video-game zombies: shambling brainless wrecks. Thanks, in part, to the vacant movie adaptation of Prince of Persia, Jake Gyllenhaal is doing theater now; the adaptation of Max Payne should have been spelled Max Pain, and the Resident Evil franchise continues to stupefy. And judging from the latest delay in the making of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Hollywood still struggles mightily with how to turn good games into good movies. more »
Movieline would like to introduce The Player, a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We'll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate, an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game. more »
