“‘Colossus’ writer: Give video games a chance”
In the Hollywood Reporters Risky Business blog, there is this recent piece: “Colussus’ writer: Give video games a chance”.
In an interview with Risky Biz, Justin Marks, who will adapt “Shadow of the Colossus” into a feature film, said that the genre was relatively young, and that he believed well-selected titles could translate if they were handled wisely.
“I think many of the games haven’t worked as movies because it’s hard to find the right game. There are very few that lend themselves to movies,” Marks said.
But that doesn’t mean that Hollywood shouldn’t try, he added. “If we started thinking that anything that worked in one medium shouldn’t be adapted for another we wouldn’t have a lot of the great movies we’ve had, because so many of them came from novels.”
Glad that Marks is so confident. Look at some reader comments:
Don’t even go there. Dont make a SOTC movie. Please substitute the word “adapt” in the second sentence of this article to “distort”.
The reason? Look at Hollywood’s track record on games to movie conversions. It is something gamers have always banged their heads on walls. You change it! You change it so far from the game, you might as well just call it something else!
And please… “young genre?” No…you mean “new market”. A new market for quick “bang out a game movie, the peons will ga-ga over the title”. Well, we are not falling for that anymore. (See Streetfighter movie, and this guy is supposed to write SOTC?!?)
Hollywood has always mangled any story that arrives in either book, game or comic. So RATHER NOT TRY! And to semi mangle Pink Floyd (hey, it works both ways) “Leave us games alone!”
To be more direct to the point, you take something we care about, spit all over it, and hands us back the soggy memory, and expect us to ask for more…
Have your own ideas. Leave the games alone.
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Never seen a good film ‘adaptation’ of any video game, if the poor game is lucky enough to get a relevant movie to the series(see: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within).
Look at what happens to all new directors/producers these days. They think that they can enter the fiery ring of fame by doing all of these big-time, non-original flicks that only seem as extravagant as they do because of the excess (and I use the word lightly) of CGI that they put into the films. This movie will be no exception.
All this aside, if they were to make a 2 hour movie about a character fighting 16 monsters which it took me personally over 6 hours to beat collectively, you have about 8 minutes per each colossus minus the time you take to add story.
FLOP
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Do NOT **** this movie up. If you make this into another Street Fighter The Story of Chun-Li or whatever that garbage was called, I hope some rabid fanboy cuts your ****s off and feeds them to your parents.
This has got to be an area of concern for the studios. But the lure of taking a pre-existing story world and commoditizing it as a movie is too strong.
Any gamers out there? What do you think about translating videogames into movies?
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