No Metroid Movie

Matt responds: Variety originally reported the news and we ran a story on it too back in January. Since then, Zide/Perry's rights to the movie have expired and as far as I know the company has not re-optioned them. What this really means is that the company is not working on a Metroid movie any longer. Sorry.
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Whew? :)

Thank you! Seriously, we all knew it would have sucked.

Thank you! Seriously, we all knew it would have sucked.

2nded.

Yay!

Yeah, it most likely would have been a horrible sci-fi cheese. Maybe someday Ridley Scott or Steven Speilberg will direct a Metriod movie...

Or Steve Gutenberg.

Or, here's a brilliant idea, why not let the lead director of the GAMES start directing the movies based on them?

...

You mean like the cinematics director of Prime create a full CG movie or something like that?

Hmm...interesting idea. It might just work!

Like they should be the ones writing the script and making the movie, not someone who's only making the movie because "the kids like video games".

Director of House of the Dead: People like this thing called House of the Dead. I don't really know what it is, but it has zombies...I think. I'm going to make a movie about it without knowing anything more and will make tons of money because it's got BRAND RECOGNITION!!

Yeah, it most likely would have been a horrible sci-fi cheese. Maybe someday Ridley Scott or Steven Speilberg will direct a Metriod movie...

Or Bo Jackson!

I think Ridley Scott would be great for the movie if only for his first name :).

Exactly!

Yeah maybe some of those but not the team behind American Pie.

Movies based on game and games based on movies, Stink!

Name one Game based movie that has had any success recently?

Tomb Raider is laughably the closes.

Can we have a simple Thumbs up & Down smiley?

Fin ~

I liked the first Tomb Raider movie. The second was a big meh. Mortal Kombat was pretty good. But when I think of videogame based movies the FIRST thing that comes to my mind is:

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/movie/coverv/18/208218.jpg

Nuff said. http://members.lycos.co.uk/sadgamer/dick.gif

I liked the mario bros movies when I was a kid! :D

I saw Mario Bros. when it came out and I thought it was a cool movie!

Me: Woah! Did see the part where Bob-omb had the Reebox shoes! That was so awesome!!

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within wasn't too bad. And it had really good special effects.

final fantasy: spirits within was one of my least favorite movies ever. man was it terrible, IMO. tomb raider was also quite bad i think considering lara didn't shoot a sing person as far as i can tell, which is strange because if i remember correctly she shot at people on occasion. oh well.

Having the game creators in a creative position on a film would produce pure shit on the screen. People who write code are not story tellers, the story is built around the code.

Unfortunately, writers, directors, DP'S you name it, feel that video games dont have a story or substance; so they make one up that everyone agrees on and then shoot it. If the people who did the cinematics in Metroid Prime directed an entire film, it would be like Torque or SWAT with Zoomers and War Wasps. In other words, an over the top special effects popcorn movie that will leave no room for any type of considerable story and will fail in its opening weekend. You'd have to find a screenplay writer that knows the Metroid story in and out and develop a closure in it's structure. People will not want to watch 2 hours of Samus Aran trying to speed boost and spark jump to a super missle tank 3 rooms over. It would have to be a different type of story, and by nature, would not feel like any of the games and would alienate Metroid fans.

Someone should try to call Peter Jackson, he's had lots of time on his hands as of late. A side from licking the heads of the Oscars and trying to convince Orlando Bloom to sponsor Visine.

Having the game creators in a creative position on a film would produce pure shit on the screen. People who write code are not story tellers, the story is built around the code.
When it comes to Metroid, yes that is absolutely true. Now if Hideo Kojima wanted to make a movie he could, and it would be good. ... actually, he has made several animated movies, so there you have it. :D

Unfortunately, writers, directors, DP'S you name it, feel that video games dont have a story or substance; so they make one up that everyone agrees on and then shoot it. If the people who did the cinematics in Metroid Prime directed an entire film, it would be like Torque or SWAT with Zoomers and War Wasps. In other words, an over the top special effects popcorn movie that will leave no room for any type of considerable story and will fail in its opening weekend. You'd have to find a screenplay writer that knows the Metroid story in and out and develop a closure in it's structure. People will not want to watch 2 hours of Samus Aran trying to speed boost and spark jump to a super missle tank 3 rooms over. It would have to be a different type of story, and by nature, would not feel like any of the games and would alienate Metroid fans.
Haha, I wouldn't mind seeing two hours worth of Metroid cinematics! But that's just me. ;)

Someone should try to call Peter Jackson, he's had lots of time on his hands as of late. A side from licking the heads of the Oscars and trying to convince Orlando Bloom to sponsor Visine.
He's making King Kong right now.

I have a somewhat intense fear of what may result from the rumored Silent Hill movie.

And this fear has nothing to do with the fear the games produce.

Silent Hill turning out bad would be like being married for fifteen years and finding out your wife is cheating on you with another woman named Judy, who looks like Vin Diesel with tits.

You should check out the recent Silent Hill comic. Pretty cool stuff.

And the movie might be good. It's got a good French director (Christopher Gans, the director of Brotherhood of the Wolf) who has a very cool style and can certainly create a dark mood, so all they need is a good script and a decent cast and you have yourself a good video game movie. But that has yet to happen so...

Why is it so hard to make a movie based on a videogame?

Because they aren't paying any attention to the game's designers! The main reason is because most of the games they copy are made in Japan, and Japan doesn't care. The rest, well, games are for children and stupid people, remember?

Just for fun we'll pick a game at random that has a cool context and somewhat human characters (makes casting calls easier).

DooM

Premise: Marines are sent to investigate Mars colonies sudden stop in communication. All are wiped out but one who discovers that Mars contains the gate in to hell itself. Using weapons of mass destruction, he destroys the evil incarnate and... Fill in the blank. He could die on Mars or get back to Earth for a happy ending. I would actually prefer he stays in hell as a demi God. Kinda Shadowman-ish. But whatever.

Okay. There's a basic premise of a story, it's cut and dry. Now, I would like anyone here to write (in novel format) about 60 to 80 pages of this story and whatever else you want to add. From that we'll break it down and create the script. The script will be a fresh start and a translation of sorts from the novel format story which will reach about 100 pages for a full feature film (figure about a minute per page)

I can tell you right now, that by the time you get to about page 20 (or sooner); you'll be making up shit that NEVER happened in any DooM game. You will do this because video games are not movies and trying to create a movie from a video game while preserving the elements of the video game is impossible. You'll end up creating sub plots and twists and new characters and all kinds of things. Why? Because if you didn't, the script would be boring as hell and no one would be able to stand reading it.

That's why screenplay writers stay away from video games. Even in a massive RPG like Final Fantasy there's still very little story.

A perfect example of what happens to a film based on a video game is House of the Dead. The game literally has no story; it's about two investigators named Player One and Player Two who find themselves thwarting evil armies with guns that reload when you fire off the screen. So some guy thought "I'll make it hip and put young people instead of the investigators" and some director said "It should be like a dark music video" and some film music engineer said "We'll use rap music!" and the result is a mish mosh of about 6 or 7 thousand different ideas at once that all equals out to a bunch of krap.

Another example on the opposite end of the spectrum, what if they get it PERFECT? Tomb Raider the Movie had an actress casted who can look and act like Lara Croft. Pro! It had a set designer who worked hard to recreate the look and feel of the levels in Tomb Raider games and a DP that actually tried to emulate the video games flow of action and plot! Pro! It was Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean)! PRO! It actually had a story that would even fit as a separate video game of the Tomb Raider series! ***PRO!!!***

The PERFECT translation! And... No one liked it. Yunno why? Because Tomb Raider is a COMPLETELY REDICULOUS RANDOM STORY THAT NEVER MAKES ANY SENSE. It never had and never will have any kind of story. Ever. Because it's a video game. Not a movie. Video games always use pieces of movies to fix the holes in their plots since as I said; the story is built around the code. Example: Code - Third Person action adventure using distance weapons to fight enemies which are placed in and around levels to block your progress. Many rooms and areas within the levels need to have the player figure out a puzzle before progressing. All levels are based on A to B scale in that once you reach your destination, the level ends and you're granted access to the next one.

Story: You play as a girl with the super human powers of money (Batman) who looks for ancient artifacts (Indiana Jones) and oh, what the hell -- fights Greeks, Russians, sometimes monks and when the time is right she'll lay down a yeti or two. All while driving snow mobiles down K-12 and firing off her biggest guns; Those Triplex Wide Double F titties that occasionally get stuck to her lips that are almost twice the size of her head.

She'll fight Sharks (Jaws) and any other crazy animal you can think of and use cool gear and gadgets (James Bond) and rely heavily on her double pistols (any John Woo movie).

Now let me ask you... are you going to pay real money to see a movie like that? Not when there’s a good movie still around to spend money on. Movies like that, like xXx, Torque and what not, have a very niche demographic; 12 year old boys with attention spans of infant mice. Not my cup of god damn tea.

It's not that I want them to perfectly capture it, I just don't want it to suck. I didn't care that the RE movie wasn't like the game. It was that the movie was terrible with or without the game that I didn't like. There's the fact that survival horror as a genre really should ONLY be done by games, even before games were around this was true :D, that kinda helps this because, well, who can actually get scared by those things when they really have no control over what happens to the characters?

The biggest complaint isn't how it strays, except in Final Fantasy Spirits Within, where absolutely nothing in the movie was anything remotely similar to anything that was ever in any Final Fantasy game. Honestly, aside from the name and a character named Cid, oh wait, Sid, notta. It's how it SUCKS even when they do as you suggest and try it in a different way to fit a movie. Street Fighter only used the character's names for example, but it sucked. Mortal Kombat, all the others, various ones I didn't even bother seeing, all sucked utterly.

Don't take it that I'm a purist or anything. Thinking of a Metroid movie I wasn't imaging something that captured the spirit of the game, but maybe something like that Iria anime only, gooderer... However, thinking of the kind of movie it WOULD end up being, it made me hurt inside. They don't all suck because they try too hard to make it like the game, most of the time, but becaue they don't ever try to do anything.

That's why screenplay writers stay away from video games. Even in a massive RPG like Final Fantasy there's still very little story.
I agree with everything but this... kinda.

The problem with translating even a game that is story-heavy is that even though the game DOES have a lot of story, the story is told in parts... sections... Hmm...

Let's use Final Fantasy VII as an example, as it has two sections where the flow is very different.

When you are in Midgar at the beginning, that part of the game could very easily be translated into movie form. Each event in that part of the game flows into the next. There are no long periods of travel or sidequests involved. Hell, if that part of the game had it's own conclusion, it would make a great movie alone. It's relatively short and is almost totally linear. You can pass it in the span of under three hours if you are steady. It is almost totally story-driven, without interruption.

After Midgar, however, you start to get those long, long periods of exploration and the story becomes very disjointed. Until you get to the Temple of the Ancients, it is almost completely episodic, and the entire point of the journey (tracking down Sephiroth) becomes almost lost in the background for a good while. Between the Temple and when you acquire the Highwind, it becomes story-driven once again, but then along comes the Huge Materia quest and we're back to the do-your-own-thing thing, more or less. Final Fantasy VII at these two points becomes less of a story and more of an RPG: it becomes more open and less linear. It would be impossible to make a two-three hour movie out of this, no matter what, unless you first eliminate about 90% of it, and then totally recraft the rest... essentially butchering it for the people who love the game, and unless it's done extraordinarily well, everyone else won't give a damn and you have a shitty game-to-movie translation.

Unfortunately, it is as you said: Producers are so desperate to cash in and make a movie based on a hot game franchise that they don't stop and consider for a moment how badly most games translate into movies, even ones that have somewhat-cohesive storylines at their heart.

i think if you cut out all exploration and just focused on the story of FF7...if you found a way to make a fairly decent conclusion 1/2 way through, you could make it into a 2 part movie...there's just too much backstory to squeeze it all into even 3 hours i think. plus you do a lot of travelling back and forth, which could make the movie seem confusing since they're constantly flying back and forth across the planet.

What about Duke Nukem the movie!

DUKE!

DJ, I've never been really scared by a video game before, but I was scared while watching the Japanese movie "Audition". I've never been scared by a game or movie before or since then. So movies can definitely be scary, even though you do not control anything. Actually, the fact that you do not have any control over the story or characters in a scary movie make you feel more helpless. Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses.

And lazy, what you say is for the most part true, but definitely does not apply to all games. Grim Fandango would make for a great movie, Metal Gear Solid would make for a great movie (hell all you'd really need to do it copy the cinemas and add in some more stuff that was used in codecs), and a few others.