I’m really starting to respect video game companies who are being courted to make their best-selling games into films. They’ve seen the way that many, many franchises have been tarnished by shit adaptations, and they don’t want the same thing to happen to their creations.
First it was Ubisoft earning themselves an unprecedented level of control over the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie, and now it’s Bioshock’s Ken Levine saying they don’t even need a movie at all.
“We got very close to having it get made – we had a deal in place and a director. But for us there’s no burning [desire] to have a movie made just to get it made. For us and for Take-Two, it’s really got to be something that will a) give the fans something that they want, and b) for those who don’t know BioShock, really introduce them to something that is consistent with the game, and is it going to be a good representation of the game. There are differences between games and movies, no doubt, but the movie has to draw from the same DNA in terms of the world and the story beats. But you know, we don’t have a need to get it made.”
He’s of course speaking of the BIOSHOCK film that was set to go with Gore Verbinski at the helm, but ended up sinking. It was the first video game film I was truly looking forward to, and I’m still a bit bummed it fell apart.
Do video games need to stop acting like having a movie adaptation is some huge and high honor for them? Can they just be satisfied with success in one genre? You don’t hear many filmmakers complain that the video game adaptation of their movie was shit.