Money, as we all know, can't buy you happiness. Yes it can buy a whole bunch of cool stuff like Lego and cake, or whatever makes you happy, but for now happiness sadly remains for promotional purposes only and will not regularly be stocked at your local ASDA. This clearly doesn't halt the relentless quest for more cash and as I'm sure I've mentioned before nothing is quite such a finely tuned revenue creation engine as Hollywood.
Everything boils down to Maths and gambling. You think your product is going to make more money than it costs to produce and you back it. the gamble is of course that no matter how much you want to make Jaws, you might just end up with Megashark vs Atomic Death Panda 3: The Revengening and the only people who pay to see your movie is the extended family of the cast and the basement dwellers who allowance just came in and they need a cheap DVD case to hide their porn from their Mums in. Suddenly you've splodged a wad of readies up the wall and everyone including Uwe Boll thinks you're a hack.
It's the universal answer to the perpetual question of "Why?". Why are they rebooting this franchise for the third time in just over a decade? Why are they resurrecting that character in yet another sequel? Why are they going back to film prequels to classic movies from twenty or thirty years ago that nobody asked for and nobody needed? You end up with the cinematic equivalent of the guy who turns up at the school reunion even though he wasn't invited; nobody wanted him there, but you kind of feel obliged to chat politely and you quickly realise you'd rather just remember that hilarious time he streaked through the modern languages department than watch it happen again in front of you. My point is that eternally searching for the Almighty Dollar lands you in hot water at some point. It's almost inevitable.
The other inevitability in Hollywood is that despite all evidence to the contrary, somebody will always think adapting video games into movies is a good idea. So far it patently is not.
To date you could easily count the half decent video game adaptations out there on one hand. You could barely keep track of the awful ones with a spreadsheet and specially designed number-crunching apparatus. It's easy to see why producers keep trying; Halo has made billions and billions of dollars and they've been trying to get a movie off the ground for years. Pretty sure Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro were both linked to it at one point, but so far fans desperate for live action Master Chief shenanigans just have to make do with the 73 animated features. I'm not saying they're basically just extended cut scenes, but they're basically just extended cut scenes. Final Fantasy have done the same sort of the thing but dispensed with logic, sense, reason and continuity initially by giving us Spirits Within. Looked lovely, made barely enough sense in and of itself but Lord only knows how that was linked to Final Fantasy.
Super Mario Bros was the first true live action video game adaption I was aware of. I saw it at the cinema, way back in the day and remember enjoying it thoroughly. 15 year old me was clearly a simpleton because it's absolutely horrible toss. There's so much wrong it would be nigh on impossible to list everything; Goombas designed as 9 foot tall, tiny-headed dinosaurs, mushrooms designed as actual mushrooms, John Leguizamo is in it. It's so awful it hasn't even achieved cult status. Street Fighter appeared a couple of years later and if it weren't for Raul Julia feasting on scenery despite being on death's door throughout filming, it would have been an absolute dumpster fire. Jean Claude Van Damme giving it his usual all, morphing seamlessly into Guile and making us forget he isn't just an ex-dancer from Belgium with one or two spinny kicks and the acting chops of several planks. The cavalcade of misery moves on, in no particular order: Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, Prince of Persia, House of the Dead (most of those are Uwe Boll disasters weirdly enough) even things like Pixels which was by all accounts a car crash of Outrun style proportions. Double Dragon, Mortal Kombat, Max Payne, Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, World of Warcraft; all basically awful.
There have been occasional bright moments; Doom was the kind of horrible crap that floats my boat. In between queasy heaves, even the first-person section was pretty well done. The Rock was The Rock as always, Karl Urban seems to be pre-emptively practising for Dredd, but stuff blew up, the BFG reared its ugly head and I went away happy. The first Resident Evil movie was pretty good overall, but that series disappeared so far up its own decomposing arse it barely resembles the game or itself any longer. It started going south when the Nemesis looked like a one-eyed lump of Plasticine going to a Goth night somewhere in the mid 90's. I haven't seen the Final Chapter, but if the penultimate one is anything to go by it'll be a horrifying mixture of green screen, crap cameos and performances phoned in from the queue for the catering lorry because they're serving sloppy joes and always run out. Mila Jovovich didn't look like she was having any fun at all in that last one, almost like she's married to the Director and is only doing it so he doesn't have some sort of mental breakdown [citation required].
I will make a concession. Assassin's Creed. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it felt like the filmmakers might actually have played the game for more than the training levels and the end result was pretty decent. I had a bit of a moment (or rather a series of moments throughout) because there seems to be mist, fog, dust or general, haziness in roughly 75% of the shots and I thought the new TV I was watching it on was duff. Either that or my eyes had developed instant cataracts.
The good news is that the more of these adaptations we get, the more chance there is of getting them right. So long as Resident Evil's Final Chapter really is just that we might be OK. Probably best not to even go into Battleships, for all our sakes.
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