It might be nice if they,… oh, I don’t know… maybe used the main characters of the very first game for some inspiration. Just a thought.

BTW, I’ve heard the argument that it would be great or ‘Hollywood’ to try making new stories in established game settings that compliment the source material. I whole heartedly agree. Take if you will the Resident Evil trilogy. The first movies was actually good. It helped to flesh out some of the events that lead up to Resident Evil Zero. The second movie was an insult to every single player that had to go through the HELL of fighting the Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Then, to boot, the writers felt the need for their character to actually save the source material’s heroine on multiple occasions. LAME!! And then the third film isn’t even set in the same reality as the games as far as I can tell. The worst part of the third film is the fact that you could have renamed all the game characters and titled it “Dawn of the Dead: Apocalypse” without anyone even noticing. Sorry for the long rant, but in short…

…new plot in established game setting = WIN!
New plot revising established game setting = LAME!

“Their way” of doing things has failed before, and now
they still think butchering a video game adaption to film is still the best way to go?

In a way I wouldn’t blame the writers, they HAVE to submit their script in a generic way so that their script gets accepted and they get paid, but the ones that are in control of what’s accepted and what isn’t, really need to think outside the box. But they don’t care as long as they make money. They have no respect at all.

The reason most movies based on games suck is because the motivation behind its production is simply to make money off the franchise. Make a movie, slap an IP on the title, trick people into going to see it. It’s roughly the same way how most games based on movies also suck.

What people need to do is get at the aspect of the game that made it interesting in the first place and then realize that concept through a different medium. It’s the same way that both music and visual art can both express sadness, but each does so in a different way. So if you want to covert a game to a movie or vice versa, you need to get at the main idea and figure out how to express that idea through the other medium.

If your idea for a movie is, “Chun Li is a martial-arts-trained detective,” you’re not getting at what made Chun Li popular. You’re just writing a generic martial arts action movie with melodrama and a Street Fighter IP slapped on the front.

However, the catch-22 he presents is a false dilemma. Sure, some people will complain about changes no matter what, but I doubt that the vast majority of fans would complain about a movie that actually does justice to the original game concept.

There are more choices available to hollywood than “carbon copy of original game” and “butcher original concept past all recognition.” There *is* a happy medium.