Top 8 Mistakes When Making Video Game Adaptations

Welcome all to another edition of The 8 Ball! This week I’m here to talk about video game adaptations, and what happens when they go bad. The following is a list of mistakes that can occur when making a movie or TV show based on a video game that hurt the project, or ultimately doom it from the start. I’m staying away from anything Uwe Boll related, since it’s all a big joke, and I’m focusing more on higher profile stuff that came out that might not have faired that well. Let’s begin:

#8: Not Having a Good Script (Super Mario Bros.)

Over its tortured lifespan of getting pre-production and even production, the Super Mario Bros. movie went through 8 different pitches and scripts. That’s..kind of a lot. This is the sin of a lot of video game adaptations, usually getting writers who produces bad scripts, which tend to be made into worse movies. The script is largely the skeleton of the movie and if it is rotten, then it’s not likely going to help matters. And for the record, the Super Mario Bros. movie isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it is bewildering to watch.

#7: Speedrunning the Game (The Last of Us)

To say The Last of Us adaptation has been a bit uneven, is an understatement. However, while a lot of the fault can be laid on the sequel game, the first season of the show had its own issue. Mainly, the first season kind of blitzed through the first game, a bit too quickly. It doesn’t need to devote four seasons to the first game, but maybe at least one or two more episodes would have let the show breathe a bit more. This isn’t solely a TLOU problem, other adaptations have been at fault here, but The Last of Us really is too brisk for its own good. Then again, now it has the opposite problem, of making the second game too long for its own good.

#6: Vanity Project (Assassin’s Creed)

Not a lot of adaptations do this, thankfully, which is good. When it happens though, does it go wrong in some impressive ways. The basic premise of most of the entire Assassin’s Creed franchise is “Man goes into his own genetic memories and plays through historical eras in his ancestors bodies through a VR construct”, it’s not hard. But, that present day man, and his ancestors don’t look alike and that is the fatal flaw of the Assassin’s Creed movie. Michael Fassbender plays both characters and it’s insane. I’m not sure if specifically requested this, or if the producers/director thought it was a good idea, but I’m here to tell them that it was not. It completely undercuts the conceit of the games, and just makes for a very wonky experience when you watch it.

#5: Miscasting (Max Payne)

Don’t get me wrong, I like Mark Wahlberg in certain roles, even roles where he plays a cop, I’m looking at you The Departed. But, this type of cop?No. Even he could be fine, but casting Mila Kunis as Mona Sax is the real crime. Mona is supposed to be this femme fatale, sexy, dangerous, obsessed character. It’s hard to get “dangerous, killer” vibes from an actress who is only 5’4 and only weight 105 pounds. Don’t get me wrong, this happens a lot with adaptations: Kristen Kreuk in the Chun-Li movie, Timothy Olyphant in Hitman, Kevin Hart in Borderlands, etc. It’s a consequence of producers thinking, “Eh, it’s close enough”, and then it being incredibly off the mark.

#4: Too Many Unneeded Plot Points (Halo)

The real tragedy of the Halo TV series was that if it focused on like two or three plotlines, it would have been great. Focus on John, Halsey, the Keyes family and that’s it. Instead, the show had like 6 or sometimes 7 different plotlines going at once. No one ever cared about Makee, or Kwan, or Soren, who I didn’t mind, but that’s me. The Halo show was over-stuffed with superfluous stuff that dragged the whole show down. It wasn’t until the end of season 2 when the Master Chief actually made it ONTO a Halo ring and then the show got cancelled. That’s some good bit of plotting right there.The Last of Us season 2 is hitting this also, so that is cool, I guess?

#3: Lack of a Budget (Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City)

From a pure cast perspective, Raccoon City was almost really great. I like Kaya Scodelario quite a bit as Claire, Hannah John-Kamen is a solid Jill, and Robbie Amell is a bland, if inoffensive, Chris. Raccoon City checks off a few boxes already on this list: miscasting Avan Jogia as Leon, not having a good script, and speedrunning not one but two games by inexplicably mashing them together. For me though, the thing that stood out is the lack of money in making the movie. It seemed like they only had the budget for like eight zombies total, with the hackneyed story beat of “Raccoon City has largely been abandoned by the populace due to Umbrella pulling out of the city”. Well, that clears up that pesky “having to pay for zombie extras” problem that other zombie movies have. For the record, the original 2002 movie cost 33 million to make, so 59 million in today’s money. Raccoon City only cost 25 million to make which is…less. If you’re not going to have an adequate budget to make a movie, then don’t even try.

#2: Audience Surrogate Character (Mortal Kombat 2021)

A few adaptations are guilty of this but the recent Mortal Kombat movie is the biggest offender. They just invent a whole, new character for the audience to follow and be invested in. As, opposed to, say, using the source material’s characters?Why would I care about “Chinney McChin” Cole Young, when a game has characters like Liu Kang, or Sonya Blade?The two Dead Rising direct-to-DVD movies suffered this same problem, they introduce a new guy, “Chase Carter” as the new character, when they literally had Rob Riggle as Frank West in the first movie, as a throw away cameo. That was actually perfect casting, why not make the movie about him?Movie producers, directors, writers, always think they know better, and they are almost always wrong.

#1: Unrelated to the Source Material (Resident Evil)

It’s really amazing to me that Paul W. S. Anderson was allowed to make not just one or two, but SIX movies based on a video game franchise that had only a passing resemblance to the games. While his films did have zombies in them, and the occasional fan-service monster or character in them, they were all largely disconnected from the games at large. For gods’ sake, the first movie is about Alice and crew trying to escape from the underground/hidden lab to the mansion above, which is the complete opposite of the game it is based on!The films got increasingly zanier as they went on, with little to no continuity between them. Resident Evil Extinction (the third one) has the planet basically dead due to the T-Virus causing all the water to go away and turning the Earth into a desert. But then somehow in Resident Evil: Afterlife (the fourth one), there are trees, oceans and icebergs back?What?These movies weren’t written by different people either, Anderson wrote and produced all 6 and he directed four of these turds himself. There are other video game movies that bear only a passing resemblance to the games, Super Mario Bros., Doom, Until Dawn, but none are as bad at missing the mark as the Resident Evil film series was.

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For comments, list the mistakes you notice in video game adaptations and why you think they happen.

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