How About a Boot to the Head? / Dustin Rowles
Trade News | January 28, 2009 | Comments (37)
It’s been sixteen years now since the very first video game adaptation, Super Mario Brothers, hit the big screen, and so far that genre has been both a critical and, largely, a commercial failure. Domestically, there’s been only one video-game adaptation to gross more than $100 million: The original Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which amassed $131 million. It’s sequel, The Cradle of Life, is the fourth most successful video-game adaptation of all time, with a meager $65 million domestic.
Video-game movies just don’t work.
Of course, that won’t stop them from making them, and now — in fact — Warner Brothers has decided to reboot the Tomb Raider franchise, only 8 years after the original movie bowed. Clearly, the continuing shrinkage of the window in between the original and the reboot is the latest trend; I understand, in fact, that they are planning to reboot the Harry Potter franchise — the first movie will run concurrently with the last movie of the existing franchise, and will feature talking animals in the roles of the wizards.
Anyway, the Tomb Raider reboot will start over from scratch — it’ll have little resemblance to the Angelina Jolie pics. There will be new missions, and there will be a new origins story. A few rumors, in fact, have suggested that Megan Fox may be taking over the role, in which case the origins story will probably take place in a sex-doll factory.
No writer, director, or cast is in place, but I suspect they’re going to try to get this into theaters by June, all the same. I understand they are going to expedite production by simply video-taping a guy playing the video game, and then morphing Brad Pitt’s face onto all the characters’ video game bodies. The production costs will be less than $10 million, but marketing will cost upwards of $150 million.
Comments
Posted by: stipe42 at January 28, 2009 5:53 PM
Video-game movies just don't work.
They might, if a studio ever made a movie out of video game with an actual story to it.
Making movies out of SMB, Tomb Raider, Doom, Mortal Kombat, etc. is the equivalent of saying movies based on books always suck because every single "book" movie has been based on pop-up books filled with no words and pages after pages of beautiful photos of explosions.