The problem with some video game movies

 On the surface video game movies are a good concept because you've already got a plot, characters and an environment which is in theory everything you need. But Hollywood has proven this theory wrong many times with many of them haemorrhaging money for the studio. This isn't because they're all bad I personally enjoyed Hitman: Agent 47 and Resident evil but the biggest mistake is control. Very simply if you play a video game it could have virtually the same plot to dozens of movies but you control what the character does and since these are generally advertised towards the people who played the games the control is gone and it's just not the same. This I think is the biggest problem with them there are other problems but I'll get to them later. First I want to have a look at 2 films which tried to solve this problem 1.

This film tried to solve this by still putting you in a fairly generic plot but this time it's first person by this I mean they literally mounted a camera onto the actors head so that you seemed to be controlling or at the very least inside the protagonists head. The most obvious is what the film is based on the first person view because it's different it's not very cinematic what i mean by that is while the action is cinematic the way it is shot isn't. The first person alone puts it at a general disadvantage with the public because it doesn't match what weve come to expect and why watch something so limiting why not watch say Jason Bourne where you get to see both sides of the battle from multiple angles and better camerawork and more action as you're just not limited to that one view. and unless you're fortunately wearing a VR headset why bother watching it. At it's core it's still a generic slightly boring action movie but this time while being inventive is less good compared to regular direction. When it came out it got mixed reviews I do hope this didn't put all directors off because as VR becomes cheaper and more consumer friendly this may end up becoming one of the best ways to experience film because you're actually there yourself. For the near future though that's not happening so lets move onto 

No.2

Bandersnatch Netflix's first "interactive film" this came out to much better reviews scoring 73% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.3 on IMDB now this is a film where you can "choose" you're own adventure like one of those fun books the reason why choose is in quotation marks there is because you can choose but sometimes the character wont listen to you because in this choose your own adventure movie they are becoming aware they are being controlled. On the premise a very good idea but 1st this eventually leads to the plot becoming confusing and slightly unintelligible because the world would collapse in on itself in a sense but it can't so it doesn't but it sort of does a form of self perpetuating confusingness. Secondly there are very mundane choices in places like repeatedly choosing the same cereal in the morning. Third not only is the character becoming self aware but it takes place depending on your path on the same day over and over again adding more to the confusingness. Most importantly though it has a fatal flaw that many many other video game films have control the character can choose to go against your orders because why should I play if it's going to do whatever it wants I might as well go and watch a normal movie. I think if they started off simpler and built up to this it may have worked but they didn't they threw no caution to the wind and going off of reviews it worked. It also has an integration problem because say in a cinema it wouldn't work so until streaming services kill off cinemas this should go back on the shelf.

Earlier I said I would go through other problems facing video game movies like how it's tough for a director to create a film of their own without exactly copying the game yet if they change it so that it is their own the fans of the movie will say it massacred the story and the creator never cared about the game to begin with. Next up is studios and studio interference a studio exec will see a video game and how it made millions in multiple markets on different consoles and so fairly they will go we should make a film of this neat little thing called a video game so during the creation process they will interfere as much as possible to squeeze as much money out as their greedy little hands can hold. This obviously interferes with how good the film is and if they meddle enough you may end up with this:

Let's go through some good examples of video game movies which aren't based on video games. Live Die Repeat has you put in some call of duty type scenario and when you die you respawn and as Tom Cruise plays the level he learns the enemies weaknesses learns how to control his weapons and eventually how to win the game. Scott pilgrim vs the world Scott faces multiple foes which he has to learn how to overcome each has a different gameplay style often referencing video games themselves he even gets an extra life token and when he kills bad guys at the end they turn into quarters like they're all inside an arcade cabinet. Alot of films have bits like these action-call of duty guitar solo-guitar hero as long as you can get some sort of sense of the fact that you are correct to think that it works often in the film makers favour.

So what is the future of video game movies?

I think they will always come out and with advances in technology they will become better and better similar and similar but there will always be the control barrier because if you have control what makes it a movie anymore and if you don't what makes it a game with some luck good ones will come out and with new ones like sonic the hedgehog and tomb raider  being some of the most recent financially successful video game films more are sure to come out with tomb raider already set to have a sequel the future seems to be they will get better but it may be a while before a true video game movie comes out.