Talking about video game movies...

 But the reality is...

Recently I spoke about the terrifying future of a video game industry spoiled rotten by the apparent 'success story' of their movie adaptations; to the point where it would actually impact the quality of the games themselves as they kowtow to a more profitable master: the movie going public. But we're a bit away from that grim reality and currently still reside in a world where video games are beholden only to our own grubby whims. Not least of all because all of the propositions for a video game movie that are currently coming out, bar the Mario movie, are just plain terrible and doomed to failure. What could there possibly be to worry about when rights purchasers are too hairbrained to snatch adaptation licences that anyone in the breathing world still remembers; let alone will actually pay money to go and see. Their stupidity is their downfall; and I'm happy to laugh at them for it.

Sega is a pretty big source for a lot of these stories. After getting a literal hail-mary with the Sonic movie, which quite honestly only was a success because the Internet straight bullied the VFX team into fixing their honestly awful design; that victory has gone to Sega's head a little. They've sniffed a little bit of the forbidden profits fruit and it's made them punch-crazy; now these idiots have mistaken luck for potential and believe their brand alone spells box office gold. Just to be clear; it was Sonic, who made the Sonic movie work, not the brand of Sega behind him. In fact, the Sonic movie bears quite honestly no resemblance to the Sonic brand as it has existed under Sega throughout their lifetime, save in visual design and a vague half-remembered shadow of his personality quirks. (Movie Sonic is a lot more co-dependent that the mouthy rebel who sells the game and comic franchise.) But Sega don't realise that; which is probably why they're apparently feeling out for a Comix Zone movie.

Now I know that sounds like the literal most 90's straight to DVD thing of all time; but that's only because this franchise is exactly that level of quality. Comix Zone is a ludicrously underserved Sega franchise about the kind of guy that only a delusional comic book artist from the 90's would think resembles 'cool', with his blonde ponytail cut-off vest and shorts and beady jazz-man glasses, who just happens to be a comic maker themselves. (Isn't that a funny coincidence.) Diet-Rohan Kishibe here, who just happens to also be a 'freelance Rock musician' too, (what the hell is a 'freelance musician'? Do they mean 'Session guitarist'?) gets trapped inside of his own alien-invasion comic thanks to handwavy magic thunderstorms and is forced to travel across comic book panels in a crazy zany adventure that breaks the fourth wall and makes references all over the place.

I'm not going to lie; for the late eighties or early nineteens that would have been a banger of a movie. I'm not kidding; this would have been the sort of cheesy shlock that gets filled away in the 'guilty classics' draw alongside 'He Man and the Masters of the Universe' and 'Jingle All The Way'; but can you really see a modern movie making that kind of cheese work? The moment for movies like this has just largely passed through pop-culture, I think; and any attempt to recapture it, even for a silly comedy romp, will just end up looking sad. I can't see any serious studio picking this up and expecting to make a buck off of it, so if Sega really are looking to offload this movie and get it made no matter the cost; I can offer them... £40 for the rights. I'll need to borrow some of that, though; let me make some calls..

The other stellar banger-to-be that has been kicking around the Sega studios is a little game called Space Channel 5 which I knew nothing about when I first saw it. Apparently the game was a rhythm action 'music video game' that got lost to the wastes of time over the years and that doesn't look like any great loss according to a lot of the preview screens I'm seeing on the game. Channel 5, is the sanitised rename that Sega's movie pitch is going with, and it is said to follow a fast food worker who is transported into the future to save the world from an alien invasion (Another one? Does some exec at Sega have a very particular fetish?) with the power of virtual dancing moves. That one honestly doesn't even sound like a nineties movie to me; it sounds like the sort of thing that would get you lit on fire and chucked out of the window of a pitch meeting.

But give me a second to see if I can't salvage something from that absolute dumpster fire of a plot layout. What if... we scrap the time travel and make this about a fast food worker who is already from some horribly dystopian (but in an over-the-top, not-so-depressing fashion) Cyberpunk-eques future, who signs up for this dance competition that all the world takes obnoxiously seriously as it's the only way to escape their dour reality and have a shot at making it big and living in the clouds or something. (Elysium rip-off perhaps, but the concept wasn't exactly novel when they coined it either.) Only for it to be discovered in the late-game that this upper crust of society that all the world aspires to is a fabrication, a carrot dangled by a race of advanced aliens who secretly conquered Earth long ago and keeps them around as an amusing bauble, like a snow globe or reality show. Then, the competition plotline to save the protagonist shifts into a plot to wake the world up to the confines of the cages they've been raised to accept and... You know I was thinking this would end in a world-wide dance party but it's really sounding like I'm leading to a violent intergalactic revolution the likes of which is reminiscent of XCOM 2... meh, the concept could use some refining. I literally came up with it as I wrote it, and I still think it's more interesting than Sega's crappy elevator pitch. Hire me to make a more interesting write up Sega, my rates are... hell, I don't have rates; I just want to make this idea less sucky.

And these are the ideas on the docket just over at Sega; you've got to bet there are people all over the industry feverishly flicking through their pocket-book of IPs weighing up which one can be whored off for mass market appeal. Point-in-case: Ubisoft. Did you know they're saving up for another Assassin's Creed adaptation? There's little news on it so I can't say whether or not it's a movie or a TV show but come on... didn't they learn their lesson the last time around? That movie was the biggest mess of context-dumping drowning out potential story beats I've seen from a movie. Like someone at Ubisoft got the bright idea of trying to dump the entire Assassin's Creed wikipedia into the movie's script and the director was too blazed out of his mind on the mountain of cocaine that Ubisoft presumably paid him in to care.

These are the video game movies of the immediate future. Brainless, futureless journeys into mediocrity that pose a threat only to the balance books of whoever's unfortunate enough to be financing these disasters. At this point, fearing about the take over of Hollywood in gaming is like trading rumours about the real world rise of Skynet. Sure, it's conceptually feasible in the case of some sort of unpredictable revolution, but on the otherhand Elon Musk's recently revealed Robot is more rudimentary than a modern day hat stand. I don't think we're going to be training guard dogs and loading up on plasma rifles anytime soon. And as for video game movies; maybe we can let a decent one or two movies release first before switching alerts to def con 1.