Why does Hollywood screw up video game movies all the time?

I mean come on Red Dead Redemption tells a much better story than Django. I do not get why Hollywood has excellent source material in there face and rarely use it and when they do it fails.

Why?

Games focus in problem solving while other stories are taught to only focus on internal conflicts.

Video games still get treated as a red-headed step-child in most other mediums, especially in the film industry. Most movies based on video games get pawned off to a director of questionable talent, and very likely do not have any of the game developers working alongside it.

That's one side of the problem. The other is that most video games just don't have good enough worlds or narratives to stand on their own merits. Bad writing is much easier to excuse in a video game than it is in a movie because the game has lots of other ways to make up for it. Movies don't have that privilege, so any bad writing is gonna shine through even more. Sometimes, even if you get a good video game narrative, that doesn't mean it could work just as well on film (Shadow of the Colossus, for instance). Entertainment mediums are not a "one size fits all" affair.

In short, the problems with video game-based movies can happen on both sides of the equation.

I'm not entirely too sure but it does take a fair amount of creativity to create a video game. Don't forget there have been a couple of "good" video games based of movies. But I believe in the fact that great movies does not equate to great video games.

@outworld222: Don't forget there have been a couple of "good" video games based of movies.

Apparently I have forgotten. Which ones were those, again?

There's no real incentive for Hollywood to make the movies good just as there's no real incentive for gaming publishers to make movie tie-ins good. As long as you don't overpay for the license, you can usually make your money back just because you've got a movie/game based on a popular product. Avatar was a pretty mediocre game that managed to sell around 3 million copies.

I think it was a Take 2 executive that said they don't care how good a movie rendition of one of their games was, because they're not paying to make the movie and it's profit for them whether the movie flops or succeeds.

Hollywood is really the ass end of entertainment now, anyway. When they're not basing their next big hit off a theme park ride or a board game, they're doing remakes or rom-coms. I'd rather have a good TV series based on a videogame, like a Fallout or Mass Effect series. TV series seem to be the place to be anymore for a good motion picture story.

Because it seems most hollywood directors are not gamers at all.

Running time is a legitimate factor. A movie is 2 hours long, on average. Even a short game is about 6 or 8. It's hard to condense a game storyline into 2 hours. It's also hard conveying the action of the game in a movie.

There's also probably a good amount of "we don't give a crap" about video game movies in Hollywood, so the production doesn't get the attention and funding it needs.

So much of a game is action that joining story parts rather than being really a part of the story. Ten battles on the way to an objective in a videogame can be told with one battle in a movie. Movies are used to condensing things, like when they're based on books and make perfectly good movies based on them.

Because of exposition: 50% of the audience is made of people who have no knowledge of the source material and need exposition to understand context. The other 50% is made of fans of the source material who are bored by redundant exposition.

The workaround is to write something that is unfamiliar to both groups, so that both can be "exposed to exposition" and an even narrative flow can be maintained.

Of course by doing so you betray the source material and end up not pleasing anybody.

Yeah that's a big difference definitely. but Don't good filmmakers find a way around it though? Most stories are about struggles against adversity and solving problems. Look at how Chris Nolan with the Dark Knight trilogy, made Batman's internal conflict add more to the batman series. (at least with the first two)

I think the biggest problem is hollywood's shallow perspective. They've stolen ideas for adaptations for decades and mainly care about superficial crap, or the brand but not what made the original video game work or click with it's players. So we end up with nonsense big screen costume parties instead of thoughtful add-ons to the original game.

Another issue would be, a lot of em don't play games, and as far as our attention spans go they're competing with video games. What better way to crap on the legacy of games than to make horrible films out of them that the rest of the public won't understand eh?

We all know games can get away with having a bad story if the mechanics and everything else is on point. Films...not so much. Most everything has to function to a degree in film or make 'some' sense... i mean just look at Battleship (bllecch).

Now maybe if people like Guillermo Del Toro, J.J. Abrams or Vin Diesel had the capital or time to finance a video game film. It might be a 'little' better. They actually play games, and understand the differences between mediums

Two things:

1. Hollywood views video game movies as cash ins, much like how game developers view movie video games as quick cash ins, and, as always when that kind of philosophy is used, the end product is more than a little disappointing.

2. Django Unchained's story is about a million times better than RDR. RDR's tone felt wildly all over the place, never knowing when to settle on seriously philisophical, silly, sad, or wahtever other tone. That, and the exposition is terrible (there's no real way of knowing exactly why John Marston is doing what he's doing until a good chunk into the game without knowing details outside the game) and the overall plot feels disjointed. "I'm a cold blooded killer and will do anything to get my wife and kid back, so yes of course I'll help you round up your cattle and pick flowers for you."

I'm a big proponent of video games being a great medium for telling stories but RDR's is not one of the games I'd point to. I still can't grasp why so many people think it's the second coming of Christ.

Video game based movies could work, but Hollywood needs to make some large adjustments. They could have easily made a fantastic Resident evil movie, but just look at the direction they took. Imagine a superb director, screenwriter and talent attached to the project, things would have been a lot more different.

Well, Nolan had a lot of source material to work with. Batman has been around longer than most of us have been alive. Video games do not have that kind of legacy to draw on.

I think it's taking a videogame like say Mortal Kombat for example and trying to fit the game's story into a 2 hour movie. It's really hard when you have to kinda improvise and say add on to the game's story to sort of expand on it. I think it's cause videogames have their own story and when Hollywood makes a movie based on a game, you think your gonna see the games story on the big screen but you get the story changed like how Resident Evil series added Alice being apart of Umbrella Corporation and being the main star of the series. It took away from the movie being in an mansion like the first game was. Then you had characters from the game show up like Wesker, Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, in cameos or support roles.

I think the only good videogame movies would be Mortal Kombat being it didn't stray from the source material. Street Fighter was pretty terrible it felt like a comedy movie. Silent Hill was good even though you didn't have Harry Mason as the lead character. I hated the second film as it was pretty bad and just a cash grab.

Yep. What Batman Begins and Dark Knight honed in on though, were the parts of Batman's lore, that weren't emphasized as much from other shows, cartoons and comics. Hence he had something to build upon.

I can easily think of examples of something that could be built upon from a game series. Consider all the details concerning the lore of Halo and the characters that at first went into the side novels. Now we have Forward Unto Dawn. Essentially the idea is not to take away or hurt the original product, but to expand upon things that weren't discussed in the original product. Some games have a lot of unanswered questions and branches for other interesting stories.

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva comes to mind... and that's about it.

EDIT: Oops, read that wrong. Thought we were talking about game-based movies.

Ever think that maybe the stories and/or dialogue just aren't good enough in most games to make a good movie? People complain about the Resident Evil movies not being like the games enough but remember the cutscenes in the first game? Corny and lame. Take Doom as another example, that movie was terrible, about the only thing it had going for it was The Rock and Karl Urban. But honestly, what is the story to Doom? Demons show up and you kill them, FFS the character you play as in Doom doesn't talk and he doesn't even have a name.

Another thing, most video game movies are based on series that have multiple games that all either establish new lore or elaborate on previously known details from the earlier games. It's asking an awful lot of a 2 hour movie to include all the elements from a well established game franchise.

@Gamefan1986: They could have made a truly amazing Silent Hill movie if it was done properly. I still enjoyed the two but I'm not going to say that they're great or even good. But I think that video game adaptations have more potential than some people think, at least certain ones.

Goldeneye 007.

And Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

If games movies are compressed than a TV series would be answer. If HBO took the Mass Effect series into TV OMG that could be a classic.

1st of all, You can't compare movies to games even adaptations.

2, video games suck in the narrative department, the movie adaptaions are just reflecting that.

And 3 Red Dead and Django ? You're reaching.

I would love for TV series to become the norm for videogames. You could basically use that to gain viewers than use that to do a feature film movie if the TV series of course takes off.

Why do video games often butcher movie tie ins?

I enjoyed Quantom of Solace a lot.

Yeah, but the original living dead movies are pretty campy, too. Back when the first RE movie was in production, there was a supposed Romero script floating around the net. I read it while eating a bowl of popcorn and had more fun than watching the actual movie. Whether or not it was what it was claimed to be or just some fan fiction, it would have been a lot better than what Paul Andersen eventually delivered. So some of the blame certainly has to be chalked up to the ineptitude of the people making the film.

I will agree that a lot of times the wrong game is picked for adaptation - like Mario, or Street Fighter or Doom. Games with no storyline. But then again, it seems like a bad choice to us because we assume the movie makers are trying to make a quality film that will be worth our time. Really, though the movie makers are just trying to get us to show up and pay for the tickets. They don't care what they can and can't fit into two hours or if their movie will be up for an award. It's a cash grab, pure and simple, and the best games to adapt for such a venture are the games with the biggest names. They know what they're doing. Bottom line, they're not really trying to make a good movie - that's secondary. If it goes that way, great, but if it doesn't...well, they've still got your money.

Because they really DON'T have excellent source material. Games usually use things that films place paramount importance on to be good (script, dialogue, characters, decent writing) as mere excuses to support game play. When you strip that game play away and attempt to shove that formula into an entirely different medium that requires more attention placed upon aspects that are traditionally ignored/belittled in a game's design, you're basically left with remnants from these designers who haven't the faintest clue as to what constitutes a good movie.