Good video game films like Silent Hill (or…yeah, just Silent Hill) show us that video game adaptations can be done with style, skill and respect to the source material. Video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, gaining popularity every year. It’s time some of our favorites were given the film treatment.
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8 ‘The Elder Scrolls’
The Lord of the Rings trilogy took in almost $3 billion worldwide. Game of Thrones consistently breaks HBO records. An Elder Scrolls movie would fit in nicely with all the fervor that surrounds magic, dragon-slaying and sprawling, epic lands. The latest Elder Scrolls even sold 7 million copies on the Xbox 360 alone. That’s a strong built-in core audience, indeed.
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7 ‘Uncharted’
The Tomb Raider movies weren’t good. The National Treasure movies weren’t good. It’ll be tough to get Indiana Jones 5 between Lucas, Spielberg and Ford’s busy schedules, so an Uncharted movie would be perfect to fill the gap in the archaeological adventure genre. Cast Nolan North, the guy who voices Nathan Drake, and you’ll make a lot of gamers happy.
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6 ‘God of War’
This series has a heart-wrenching story and gut-wrenching violence, two things that go together magically and could make a dazzling, heroic adventure of titanic proportions.
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5 ‘Dead Space’
If this followed in the footsteps of the first game, i.e. terror and isolation rather than the action-oriented second and third installments, this could offer a truly terrifying experience. Necromorphs and their varying forms, hyper-aggressive nature and the clever way they need to be dispatched could make for an awesome horror flick.
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4 ‘Grand Theft Auto’
This would seem like a no-brainer, except how do you make a script for a game that is so great on its own, but as a movie wouldn’t be much different than any other criminal-rising-to-the-top film? We all want this, but it would have to be a great script to make it worthwhile.
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3 ‘Bioshock’
The Bioshock games have so much meat such a wonderful style to them that a movie seems inevitable. And yet, hopes of this happening have pretty much been dead in the years since the initial announcement of Gore Verbinski’s attachment to it in 2008. Let’s hope that Bioshock Infinite gets interest going again, because a Bioshock film done right would be gorgeous and enrapturing at the very least.
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2 ‘Halo’
Why has this still not happened? Back in 2006 Peter Jackson was attached to the project and recently Neil Blomkamp of District 9 fame has commented on his interest in doing it.
Let me go back and answer my original question with a commonly known symbol: $. Investors who probably don’t understand that this will easily make back its $200-$250 million, plus its $100+ million marketing budget worldwide (and maybe in the U.S. alone), are losing out, as is the gaming community who has been waiting patiently for this to happen year after year.
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1 ‘Doom’ (a better one)
The Rock pissed a lot of people off by assuring Doom fanatics that the movie would be true to the story and executed with respect to the Doom canon. It did not. Aside from one cool part that had a first person shooter pace and aesthetic, the rest of the movie was poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly conceived and just plain boring.
Go back and go simpler. Use an indie film-sized budget and do it with some no-name actors and for God’s sake just make an adaptation of the awesome Doom novel Knee Deep in the Dead that was written by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver and came out in the mid-90s.
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