Why are video game movies so bad?

I'm not even talking about like MCU/Force Awakens stylr rehashing the same shit we've seen a million times before bad. I'm talking cinematic abortion bad. It makes no sense.

I guess a lot of games (like Warcraft) have convoluted mythologies which can be hard to translate into film, but why not just go the Marvel route and simplify that shit? Sometimes it looks ike they're fucking up on purpose. Look at the Super Mario Bros movie. Mario itself is a painfully simple story about a dude rescuing a princess from a scary monster in a colorful fantasy world that has virtually no complex rules or logic. As long as it looks like Mario you can pretty much do anything you want and no one will question it. But for one reason or another they decided to do the exact opposite and make it into a convoluted thing where there is an alternate dimension in which the dinosaurs never went extinct and have evolved to look exactly like humans, and they all live in one dreary dystopian city that is apparently surrounded by planet-wide desert for reasons that are never made clear, and they are governed by a nefarious businessman who hatches a plan to take out the monarchy (which also exists for reasons that are never made clear) by making an army of minions using a de-evolution gun to turn them into giant dudes with tiny lizard heads (which I guess was what dinosaurs look like in this world, except for Yoshi who isa real dinosaur), and also using the gun on the king but it turns him into a weird snot-like fungus for no reason, which would kind of make sense because there is a race of sentient mushroom people in the games, except the royal family is also reptilian because we see that the princess is hatched from an egg... NONE OF THAT SHIT IS EVEN IN THE GAME! Who the fuck is in charge of making these things?

Best Videogame of 2000s reporting in

Super Mario Bros movie is kino

Writing isn't that good but there is a video game in place to pull you though

With movies all you have is the writing

A lot of video games like rts games aren't strictly character driven so there's a lot more work and translating that has to be made when in compared to things like comic books where they often follow a specific super hero.

It's not uncommon for there to be a lot of world building and fictional history in these video games that fans read up on and they start to want to see it explored further.
How much different fans read into that varies, and it can give them very different expectations.

>With movies all you have is the writing
No you have acting, direction and special effects.
You're thinking of books.

There are games I've played that have total shit writing but I continue playing them to this day because I find them fun. If a movie has garbage writing, it's harder to forgive even if the acting, direction, cinematography, set pieces or cgi are top notch. It's like tossing a fistful of glitter on top of a week old dog turd.

Tl;Dr, big budget filmmakers are often too lazy and greedy to make a faithful adaptation of a game because failing at that would be worse than just making a bad movie.

Video game movies are usually made by giant studios. Giant studios want to make as much money as possible so they produce movies that have the widest appeal possible. This means they have to take, using your example, Super Mario and make it something that mom and dad could enjoy as well as the kiddos. They want the nerd who obsessively plays the game as well as the jock bully who beats him up.

Usually to do this, they lean too heavily on attracting the people who are unfamiliar with the game and try to use the film as either an introduction to the game world, using preexisting characters and plot elements in a compact and simplified way(silent hill, warcraft I'm assuming) or a reconstructed spinoff that keeps little more than the title of the game (Resident Evil, Super Mario)

Most video game movies fall into the latter category because it's easier. They can even take an old unused script for something else, change a few things and call it Resident Evil. They don't have to worry about staying true to the game because they're not trying to make a shot for shot remake of the game. They're just capitalizing on the popularity of the title.

True, but there is only so much an actor/director/fx guy can do to elevate bad material. If you take a script like Tommy Wiseu's The Room and hand it to Martin Scorsese and cast Daniel Day Lewis in the lead and it will still be a bad movie. It would likely be a better movie, but a bad movie none the less. You can make a great movie out of a bland script, but you can't make a good movie out of a broken script.

That's an interesting point, but if that's the sort of thing they're shooting for, they're doing a terrible job at it. With Warcraft, I don't see how it could appeal to anyone but diehard fans.i haven't seen Assasin's Creed but I hear it suffers from the same problem. With Mario it feels like they were legitimately trying to make it accessible to the least amount of people as humanly possible. Fans disliked it because it was nothing like the source material, and general audiences didn't like it because it was a weird and convoluted mess. It s like they took a title that already appealed to fans and normies alike, then lit it on fire for no good reason.

I think the Pokémon cartoon is a good example of a game adaptation done right. I don't think the writing is very good, but the formula itself works perfectly. It stays close enough to the source material that it feels like the games, but they were also prescient enough to know that a direct adaptation would be far too linear and repetitive to work. The plot of the games are all exactly the same; get a Pokémon, fill up the pokedex on on behalf of a Pokémon professor, defeat 8 gym leaders and the Elite Four. Each of those elements are present in the show, but it bends the rules just enough to make things flow as a narrative.

Instead of having a laser focus on catching Pokémon and beating gym leaders, they allow Ash et al to go on unrelated adventures which usually utilize specific Pokémon which usually utilizes a specific ability in order to resolve the specific problem. It also streamlines or omits many of the more conspicuous gameplay elements. Instead of catching Pokémon in order to fill out the pokedex (which makes no sense considering Pokémon aren't a new thing in the world), it is used as an exposition device. Instead of evolution being tied to leveling up, it is just a thing that happens. There are more examples, but you get the picture. That's how studios should approach this sort of thing

Warcraft was dope

Warcraft wasnt a bad movie though.

This. Really enjoyed it. Gul'Dan was best villain.

I liked most of the individual elements of Warcraft, the trouble is that it was way too bloated for one movie. Warcraft is a good example of a game with a dense mythology. As someone who never played the games it was way too much to take in at once. I understood the plot and how each of the individual characters fit into it, but the lightning fast pace of the movie prevented me from caring about anything that was happening. It would have worked much better as a trilogy. World building and character delelopment takes time, especially when the narrative takes place in a high concept fantasy setting. If you try and rush it and cut corners, you end up with something like Suicide Squad. There are plenty of characters who are doing neat things, but ultimately the movie feels boring and empty.

This

And the games that are character driven have so much content it would be like making a tv series into a movie, packing 15 hours of story into 1 hour and 30 minutes.

>With Mario it feels like they were legitimately trying to make it accessible to the least amount of people as humanly possible. Fans disliked it because it was nothing like the source material, and general audiences didn't like it because it was a weird and convoluted mess. It s like they took a title that already appealed to fans and normies alike, then lit it on fire for no good reason.

I believe the Mario movie should not be used as an example for anything when talking about videogame adaptations.

All other movies fall into one of 2 categories this user described.

But Mario was just plain fucking weird. I recall there's some mad story behind it, like the director was actually admitted to mental institution or something, so it really is not a good example for anything.

>Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel didn’t have many movie credits to their names. In fact, the husband and wife team had only directed one other film, a critical and commercial bomb called D.O.A.. The duo cut their teeth directing commercials for Coca-Cola and Hardee’s restaurants, eventually finding small success after creating the television series Max Headroom. Lightmotive loved Max Headroom’s zany vibe and felt that Morton and Jankel had the right imagination for a film like Super Mario Bros.

>Nintendo’s hands were off the project by this point. “I met with the game’s designer [Shigeru Miyamoto] very briefly, like for a half an hour meeting or something, but that was about it really,” director Rocky Morton told us. “Nintendo let us do whatever we wanted. They just put a crushing deadline on the project. The movie had to be made by a certain date, otherwise there were all these financial penalties, which added a lot of extra stress to the project.”

As the production rushed toward principal photography, the directors and producers struggled to agree on a script to match the movie’s new direction. More rewrites were issued. One action-packed treatment seemed inspired by Die Hard. The script itself contained a scene in which Bruce Willis could make a cameo, scurrying through the air ducts above King Koopa’s office. Another script featured Mad Max-style death races. It seemed that the Super Mario Bros. film was pulling inspiration from everything except the game series that shared its name.

>By mid-1992, production was well under way. Holding to the director’s inspiration for a darker film, Lightmotive agreed to hire the art director who worked on Blade Runner to transform an abandoned cement plant in North Carolina into a cyberpunk wonderland. Campaign posters portrayed Dennis Hopper’s version of King Koopa kissing babies. Street vendors served kabobs of flame-broiled lizard. A club called the Boom Boom Bar advertised hot blood cocktails. Electric cars trailed sparks as they buzzed through the city’s main artery.

>“I wanted the film to be more sophisticated,” Morton said. “I wanted parents to really get into it. At that time, there was a very hardcore movement against video games, and a lot of anti-video games sentiment. I wanted to make a film that would open it up and get parents interested in video games. It’s completely different now, but back then it was taboo to make a movie based on a video game.”

>Not everyone shared Morton and Jankel’s vision for the film. The studio was expecting a lighthearted kids film, and most of the cast and crew had signed on with similar expectations. The tensions between these two visions began to tear apart the production. The studio felt that the movie was too dark, pressuring Morton and Jankel to lighten the tone. Lightmotive brought in the writer from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to write yet another version of the script.

Warcraft was alright if you're a fan of the game. I can see why critics gave it bad reviews though, editing was all over the place.

>“We were forbidden to work with that writer,” Morton recalled. “And that was only a couple of weeks before we went into principle photography. I’d already had the set built and a lot of characters with prosthetics had already been made, so that script came in and a lot of it didn’t match what we’d already started working on.”

>By this point, at least nine writers had worked on the film, and rewrites would continue long after the cameras started rolling. The script ballooned into a rainbow of confusion as the production crew was continually handed new color-coded daily edits.

>Despite Morton and Jankel’s vision for a movie that sounded nothing like Nintendo’s series, the duo attentively worked in several video game references. Yoshi appeared as King Koopa’s pet, and spray-painted SNES Super Scopes functioned as portable devolution guns during the film’s climax. One key reference almost didn’t make the cut; Morton and Jankel didn’t want the Mario brothers to appear in their classic red and green overalls. They fought with the producers about the costumes for weeks but finally consented, allowing Mario and Luigi to don their familiar outfits about three fourths of the way through the film.

>From the crew’s point of view, Morton and Jankel were micromanaging every facet of the production. At one point, Morton allegedly poured coffee on an extra because he didn’t think the actor looked dirty enough for the scene. According to a 1992 Chicago Tribune article, the crew began calling the directors derogatory names behind their back. One of their favorites was “Rocky and Annabel, the Flying Squirrel Show.”

>Filming was scheduled to last 10 weeks, but it slowly stretched into 15. Everyone had different ways of dealing with the frustrating production schedule. John Leguizamo, who had been cast as Luigi, started drinking. In his biography, Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends: My Life, Leguizamo describes how he started doing shots of scotch with Hoskins between scenes. During a scene in which Leguizamo was driving a van, the actor was reportedly drunk and braked too hard, causing the sliding door to smash shut on Hoskins’ hand. During certain sequences of the film, Hoskins can briefly be seen wearing a pink cast.

>Other members of the crew saw the chaotic production as an opportunity. According to SMB Movie Archive, Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson, who played Koopa’s henchmen Spike and Iggy, started writing their own dialogue, and even convinced the studio to film a rap scene starring them that was ultimately cut from the theatrical release. At one point in the original script, Koopa had their characters devolved into goombas, but the actors sold the directors on the idea that their characters should be further evolved to become super smart instead. Plot changes like this weren’t just common – they were happening on a daily basis.

>“They were like a double act,” Morton said of Stevens and Edson. “They were young and enthusiastic and inventive, and they definitely came up with stuff for their characters. You know, there were flaws in the script that had to be plugged and worked on while we were shooting, so there was a lot of rewriting and ad-libbing to try and make sense of everything.”

>Over budget, behind schedule, and managing a cast and crew that was either drunk, working off-script, or completely belligerent, Super Mario Bros. had run completely off rails. But this train hadn’t wrecked yet.

>The end of Super Mario Bros. was a hack job. Morton and Jankel had hoped to film an epic battle sequence on the Brooklyn Bridge. Storyboards were drawn up in which the two realities would start to merge as Mario faced off against Bowser on the iconic structure. Mario eventually won after dropping a Bob-Omb down Koopa’s throat then kicking him into the river before he exploded. The scene would never be filmed. The film’s producers were tired of spending money on the production. Instead, Koopa was blasted with the Super Scope guns and reduced to a primordial sludge.

>“You have to remember that CGI technology was a lot cruder back then,” Morton explained. “It was very expensive and hard to do, and we were running out of money, so we couldn’t do a lot of the elaborate effects and stuff that I wanted to do.”

>After principle photography ended, the film’s producers tried to cut Morton and Jankel out of the picture. Lightmotive had gotten two other production companies to buy into the film, and now there were three sets of producers that had money at stake if the movie bombed. Many producers felt that the film needed more action, so a second unit set out to film a couple extra action sequences. Morton and Jankel weren’t invited to those shoots, but that wasn’t the only thing the directing duo was shut out from.

>“I was locked out of the editing room,” Morton said. “I had to get the DGA [Director’s Guild of America union] to come and help me get back into the editing room. I tried to get the editor to cut it digitally, but they refused. They wanted to edit on Moviola and Steenbeck machines, so the process was laboriously slow, which didn’t help us get the special effect cut in on time.”

>Super Mario Bros. released to theaters on May 28, 1993. The film cost $48 million to make and grossed less than $21 million. Going up against hit summer films like Mrs. Doubtfire, The Fugitive, and Jurassic Park, the movie probably never had a chance to make back its money. Even Tom Hanks’ new film, Sleepless in Seattle, out-grossed Mario by $200 million. No one was happy.

>The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Bros.,” Hoskins told The Guardian in an interview back in 2007. “It was a f---in’ nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! F---in’ nightmare. F---in’ idiots.”

Sounded like a complete shitshow, much like the movie. You could probably put together a decent documentary about it.

Super Mario Bros : This Ain't No Video Game (2014). Most likely available on torrent or youtube.