Samuel Hadida is taking on the Wolfenstein video-game franchise. Considering that his Resident Evil movies made more than $500 million, that’s big news. If you didn’t spend the early '90s introducing Nazis to bullets, Wolfenstein 3D is the grandaddy of all great first person shooters. It came out a year before the similarly influential Doom was released by the same company (id Software). The parallels will hopefully end there. With Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary slated to write and direct the Wolfenstein movie, it should be a helluva lot more watchable than the 2005 Doom adaptation that starred Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (and almost spelled doom for his acting career) . more »
Microsoft and 343 industries aren’t getting into the cinema, they’re sidestepping it entirely as an obsolete technology. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a 90-minute, $10 million dollar movie, and if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about its upcoming release, it’s because it’s already out. The new movie follows the a squad of military cadets as they gradually learn how to be soldiers and then, very suddenly, learn that they’re under alien attack. Finally, they learn that Master Chief kicks ass. But gamers already knew that. more »
This week sees the release of Resident Evil: Retribution, the next installment in what has been dubbed the “most successful” of video game movie series, a shallow victory indeed. Considering that contemporary video games have become cinematic, employing many proven Hollywood techniques in their platforms, it means that once those properties are adapted for the screen you could end up with the proverbial serpent eating its own tail. In the case of Doom however you end up with something else; much like a document that has been photocopied from a fax of a forgery taken from a carbon-copy, what you end up with is an indecipherable mess.
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