Hollywoodizing and Possibly Bastardization
Hollywood is always on the lookout for established IPs with name recognition that can bring in big bucks. There are tons of books that have been adapted into film format, some with great success, and some with disastrous results, but that hasn’t stopped studios from trying to find that next title that will become a blockbuster. There’s also a ton of games that have been adapted into film format, and as a gamer I can easily say that most of those have been disasters. Sure there’s been a few movies out there that turn out alright, but most of them have been complete misses.
For some reason most film studios are under the impression that if they slap the name of a recognizable IP it will be enough. They are more likely to throw away most of the core of what made those games memorable, than to keep to “the script” of the game. I understand that people want to make a version of something to call their own, but I truly believe that by removing most of the theme, genre, storyline, and other bits of the game they should not be able to slap the name on the movie. One of the reasons I think studios do that is to dumb down what the IP is to make it more appealing to the general masses, which honestly I think is ridiculous. If you are going to try to create an adaptation of something because it's popular, doesn't it make sense to try to stay as true to the source material as you can? I do understand that there is at least one genre out there where that might be damn near impossible to do, that being open-world games.
In my opinion there is so much content in an open-world game that the best approach would be to take a side-story found within the game and expand upon it, or take some of the components of it and mold a story out of it. Some of the components could be specific locations and people. If a studio wants to try to take on the main storyline of a game, in my opinion you HAVE TO stay true to it. To the casual observer, if done well, they will see a well fleshed out story unfold in front of them. Diehard fans of the IP will be able to see and appreciate the thoughts and energy that went into making this film. I say this but I do begrudgingly admit that it is easier to slap a recognizable IPs name that isn’t really well known to most of the potential viewers and then spew out a movie script that loosely has at least one component of the IP in it. I will also admit that there are a couple of movies out there that stay close to the source material and get panned by the average joe, mostly because the components present in the film go over their heads.
For example one of the IPs I CONTINUOUSLY rail against is the Transformer movies. These movies do have Autobots that, for the most part, match up to what the original character design is, but I don’t remember storylines that so heavily revolved around military forces. I consider the Transformer movies a “generic soldier movie that has a couple massive robots that happen to share commonality with the Transformer franchise”. I know that these movies have had enough popularity to spawn 5 films, but as a fan of the IP since 1984 it hurts my nerd heart.
There are tons of other examples out there, and I’m sure I could go on and on about each but I shall refrain, for now, from breaking down each example. There will never be a magical formula for success no matter the approach a film studio takes, but I personally appreciate and love the attention to detail that studios can apply to creating movies.