Hollywood's gone full throttle on video game adaptations lately, with a slew of titles like "The Legend of Zelda," "Elden Ring," "Call of Duty," "God of War," "Metal Gear Solid," and "It Takes Two" all reportedly getting the big-screen or TV series treatment.
But hold your horses! Adi Shankar, the showrunner behind Netflix's "Devil May Cry" animated series, isn't exactly bullish on this trend, recently dropping some pretty bleak predictions.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, Shankar spilled the tea, suggesting that most of these announced game adaptations probably won't even make it to production. And even if they do, he reckons very few will actually hit the mark. The real kicker, he says, isn't some "video game adaptation curse," but rather that studio execs just don't get games as a medium. To them, popular IPs are just "brands" and "logos" to slap on something new.
"I think the vast majority of video game adaptations that actually come out are inevitably going to be awkward," Shankar elaborated. He pointed out that many hugely successful games, once they reach a certain scale, are no longer steered by their original creators. Instead, they're handed over to corporations and brand managers.
"When you look at games that are very successful, they're actually not run by the people who made the game anymore. They're run by corporations, and then they assign brand managers to it, right? At that stage, when a game has been run as a brand for too long, it just becomes a logo," Shankar stated. "You just slap that logo on everything, and then there's countless spin-offs, mobile games, whatever... Okay, everything's a brand now. At that point, you're like, where's the 'Captain Crunch' movie?"
When a game is treated as a brand for too long, it often devolves into a mere logo that can be slapped onto all sorts of products, spawning spin-offs, mobile games, and various merchandise.
While recent hits like "The Last of Us," "Fallout," and "Sonic the Hedgehog" have reignited hope for game adaptations, the lukewarm reception for projects such as "Borderlands," "A Minecraft Movie," and "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" has once again cast doubt on the idea that the "game adaptation curse" has been broken.
Outlets have also highlighted "Fallout" as a different kind of adaptation success story, one that doesn't just rehash the game's plot but tells an entirely new narrative within the established world. This approach cleverly sidesteps the challenge of losing the interactive core of gaming while still retaining iconic series elements. However, if not handled with care, such creative liberties could still draw flak from fans for distorting the source material.
Shankar concluded by noting that since the '90s, countless comic book and video game adaptation projects have been announced, yet many never see the light of day. He believes that game adaptations involve too many stakeholders; announcing a project is the easy part. The real challenge, he stressed, is actually finishing it and making something genuinely good.
via： TheGamer