A looming portent on the horizon.
In 2008 the movie Iron Man released on an unsuspecting public with a decently favourable splash among those who had seen lukewarm superhero movie adaptations for most of their lives. Sure there were the gems among the garbage, such as the Spiderman movie series, but most adaptations tended to forgo what made the character special in favour of seizing the property and iconography in order to make the movie that they wanted to make, instead of what the character needed to star in. Daredevil, The Punisher, Spawn; those are examples of movies that were along the right track, but fell short of really encapsulating the character and adapting that adequately, and thus failed to translate what made those characters special to that wider movie going audience. Ironman ended with a stinger after the story wrapped up, hinting at more movies and a wider Avengers story down the line. Of course, this wasn't the first movie to promise such and I'll bet that most who saw this just assumed that it was idle wishful hoping for a sequel that would ultimately build up into nothing like those before it.
Nearly fifteen years of Marvel Movies later, with that becoming the most profitable movie franchise ever made, (through sheer attrition and number of movies) such pessimism seems almost silly. As does the expectation that any adaptation upcoming would be happy just sticking to the property it was working on; not when it can be strung along into a shallow attempt to mimic Marvel's success and become the next billion-breaking franchise. Universal unsuccessfully tried to launch their Dark Universe; DC is desperate to push their own out of the door, and now it looks like the onus has fallen on video games to try their hand at a craft they are notoriously ill-fitted for. As though countless years of failures were just teething troubles, now we've got the optimistic spur of an interconnect Nintendo franchise universe lapping at our heels and, horribly, it's looking like a more plausible vision by the day.
Marvel's success has not come without it's detriment to the comic books it drained from. Before the movie franchise, comics were their own entity spurred by their own fanbases and focusing on their own stories and characters. They were beholden only to themselves, unless they were part of a bigger franchise but even then; diversity and flexibility of audiences and themes mattered. But when the MCU started making millions, the focus shifted. If you look at Marvel today and ask what it's central and most important market is, they will tell you it's the movies. This comic book company now produces comic books as a secondary market far eclipsed by the more important and more popular movies. Now the comics need to fit the style of the movies, the characters have to look like their actor counter-parts, the audience and themes need to be synchronous. It will only be a matter of time before comic lines that run contrary to where the movies are going (despite the fact that these movies are several decades behind where the comics were before they started popping off) are going to be canned for fear of 'confusing the wider demographic'. The comics lost their prominence, and consequently their power.
If you think there's no chance of that happening for the video game landscape, just look at the two of the biggest adaptations for this year; Halo and The Last of Us. Both properties pride themselves on the fact that they don't care for the video games that made those names household-worthy in the first place; they'd rather piggyback off the concept, branding and designs to mount their own version. Why do they feel so gallant about bragging how they ignored the source material? Because traditional media feels themselves inherently superior to younger alternatives. TV show makers and movie producers look at video games as an inferior art form, not worthy of their attention or their respect. But they're popular, they draw in a crowd, so those same detractors are more than happy to step on the back of games to try and make their buck. Just don't ask them to pay the most basic amount of respect and at least play the thing so they're familiar with the sort of experience they're supposed to be adapting.
Interactivity is increadibly important to the gaming medium and the emotions invoked by a player who has their hands on the controls is unique and special to video games. You can't get the gist of how protective you're supposed to be over Elizabeth from Bioshock without actually playing the game and feeling the synchronous relationship between you and her. You can't infer that sense of boundless wonder of staring upon the looping strip of your first Halo ring by just reading about it on paper. Video games are designed to be experienced, and tweaked to adjust for levels of skills, disability and difficulty. Because at the end of the day; living the game and it's gameplay is what you need to do to understand video game properties. Why else do you think both Hitman movies totally missed the mark on what the franchise is even about? Because they read the synopsis and thought "Bald super assassin who never misses his mark? That'll be an action movie, right?" If you don't respect the game, you can't expect to adapt it well.
But we may just have the movie which is destined to act as our Iron Man moment. The game to break the dam and usher in a new age of video game movies; and that might just be the Super Mario Bros movie. Because all of these failures and half hearted attempts aren't going to shift the balance of the industry, no it's going to take one massive billion-dollar crossing success story; and Mario has the brand recognition and, potentially, the quality to pull it off. Everyone who watched that trailer knows, bar Chris Pratt's question conviction, the level of talent on display looks incredible. The animation is top notch, the designs are impeccable; this resembles the Mario we all love and doesn't look like the disappointment that most of the world expected. And that's probably due very much to Nintendo themselves.
The live action travesty-edition of Super Mario Bros the movie was a huge embarrassment for Nintendo, such that they wrote off any attempts to adapt their franchises for decades after the fact. More likely than not, whoever is working on this movie has Shigeru Miyamoto hanging over his chair with a pair of stomping shoes ready to make sure they don't go a hair out of line; and that seems to be the trick we need to get a video game adaptation that nails the look and feel that the games we're going for. Sonic may be a decent movie, but not because it really nailed who Sonic of the games were, but because the direction they took the franchise was decent enough. Mario could very well be the very first time the world is shown how video game adaptations can be faithful and successful. And that just might spell doom for a lot of video game franchises as it did for the comic-book world.
To be fair, I think the gaming industry currently is much bigger than comics ever were, so the dominance of Hollywood isn't going to totally drown out the voices of the developers and publishers no matter how big this adaptation trend grows. But this could hurt the slow rise of general validity that the gaming industry has been struggling to cement in the hearts of the public for decades; as a medium with the potential to be taken seriously. Comics had to fight for that right, and now have lost it in a world where they're seen as companion pieces to big budget movies; video games could very well end up going the exact same way. At the very least, if this is a trend that ends up picking traction; it will lead to the birth of an entire industry of knock-off film makers who buy up the most obscure licence rights to make their crappy D-grade adaptation. Gex the Gecko; you are getting your movie!
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