Hollywood began to use television as a more effective way to adapt video games, after a history of film failures.
Video game film adaptations have been common in Hollywood for the past two decades, but for the most part they have been constantly ridiculed by critics and have flopped at the box office.
The most recent video game movie, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” (one of the most successful series on the big screen), has grossed just US $ 14 million in the United States, and US $ 25 million worldwide, and received a Rotten Tomatoes critical rating of 30%.
It is true that there have been some hits like “Sonic the Hedgehog” (which will have a sequel in 2022) and “Pokemon Detective Pikachu”, the two highest grossing video game films in the United States with US $ 149 million and US $ 144 million respectively. But there were many more mistakes than hits.
That doesn’t mean that Hollywood is done with video game movies. Sony’s “Uncharted” will hit theaters next year, and Eli Roth (director of “Hoste”) is making a “Borderlands” movie. But the industry is also beginning to see the potential of television adaptations like never before.
Projects. Game sales reached a record $ 57 billion in 2020, according to a report by the NPD firm. The “Halo” video game franchise alone has made $ 6 billion since the first game was released 20 years ago, not including the latest update, “Halo Infinite,” which was released last Wednesday. And on Thursday, Paramount + released the first trailer for its upcoming TV series “Halo,” the biggest title yet on the Viacom group platform.
Meanwhile, Netflix, which has just launched “Arcane” and the new season of “The Witcher”, has in its folder the series “Assassin’s Creed” and “Resident Evil”. HBO is signing up with “The Last of Us,” and Amazon with “Fallout,” as it seeks a deal to do a series on “Mass Effect,” the hit sci-fi role-playing game saga, as reported recently by the producer Deadline. .
“If you’re going to tell a story as developed as ‘Mass Effect,’ television is the way to do it,” Mac Walters, the “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition” project director, told Insider during a recent interview. “There is a natural way that it fits in well with episodic content,” he explained.
Walters recounted that a planned “Mass Effect” movie was scrapped a decade ago because the producers failed to effectively remake the story. A reflection of why the video game industry sees television as the best medium for adaptations.
Worlds. “We played our favorite games for hundreds of hours,” said Christian Linke, the showrunner of the Netflix series “Arcane.” “The movies do not do justice to the experience when you only stay in that world for two hours,” added who is also the creative director of Riot Games.
“Arcane” has reached Netflix’s Top 10 in 83 countries around the world since its launch earlier this month. The creators, Alex Lee and Christian Linke, say that passionate fans of the game have helped “Arcane” succeed where other on-screen game projects have failed. And they say that the objective of turning the video game into a television series was to “delve into the stories of these characters.”
The story follows sisters Vi and Jinx, who find themselves on opposite sides of a war. “We seek to understand what makes them people beyond what makes them warriors. The audience always had these questions, what happened between them? They are rival sisters in our game, but how did they end up like this?”
Vi and Jinx are central figures in one of the most popular video games on the planet: “League of Legends”, known simply as “LOL”, which has a community of 180 million players worldwide (of which 120 million are assets, quadrupling their reach in five years). A game that only in 2020 raised about 1.75 billion dollars according to Statistas.
Mass. The rights to “Mass Effect” have just been acquired by Amazon Studios and the Normandy crew would be docking at Prime Video in the not too distant future. The director of Amazon Studios, Jennifer Salke, announced that the company is reaching an agreement with Electronic Arts to develop in 2022 a television series based on the successful series of role-playing and science fiction video games, created by BioWare. As in the game, Commander Shepard must lead his team to solve ancient mysteries and save the galaxy from the threat of the Reapers, an ancient race of intelligent machines bent on annihilating all kinds of life.
The first Mass Effect game hit stores in 2007, and since then the franchise has become one of the most popular games on the market. The Mass Effect universe contains the original trilogy, which follows the same characters throughout each adventure, and a spin-off, “Mass Effect: Andromeda,” which was released in 2017.
BioWare also recently teased a new game in the series, after releasing “Mass Effect: Legendary Edition” earlier this year, combining the first three Mass Effect games.
The “Mass Effect” series won’t be Amazon’s first foray into video game adaptations. Last year, Amazon Studios announced a series based on Bethesda’s “Fallout” game series, which features “Westworld” (HBO) creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy serving as executive producers.
Amazon has also dabbled in science fiction with “The Expanse,” a popular space opera, and the superhero comedy, “The Boys.”
Trend. Aside from successful children’s cartoons like “Pokémon” or “Angry Birds,” adult programs that are based on games have had a hard time breaking through. In the past decade, attempts like “Halo: Forward Unto Dawn,” “Street Fighters: Assassins Fist,” and “Dragon Age: Redemption,” have been released online, but they didn’t leave a lasting impression.
“It was a leap of faith to allow ‘Arcane’ to be made, especially given these other failures,” acknowledges Alex Lee. “And it’s always a challenge to keep fans happy while introducing an installed video game to a new audience,” he adds.
For Christian Linke, “For a long time, it was a bit like Hollywood was looking through the window from the outside and saying, ‘There’s something special going on there, but we have to find out what it is.’ video games, the previous failures were due to the creators cending their licenses to movie studios instead of participating in the process (something similar happened with Marvel comics). “Now we are reaching a point where video games have matured enough, and people like us, people who come from the studio and from the game, grew up and now have enough experience to try something as ambitious as this, the leap into a fictional story that appeals to other audiences. ” With the rise of streaming in recent years, media companies are competing for well-established intellectual property to attract subscribers, something the games industry offers in abundance.
