Lost in translation: Film adaptations of video games keep bombing

"Doom." "Super Mario Bros." "Final Fantasy." As video games go, each has been wildly successful, earning legions of dedicated fans while selling thousands of copies.

But as films go ... well, that's another story.

Stinkers. Bombs. Total failures. These are the words that most accurately describe the feature films created from these best-selling video games.

Wrote one movie critic who sat through last year's silver-screen version of "Doom": "Too often 'Doom' is mindless entertainment minus the entertainment."

Early next year, the best-selling fighting game "Dead or Alive" is scheduled to join the ranks of video games adapted to film. Having already opened in the United Kingdom, advance reviews suggest moviegoers shouldn't get their hopes up.

"The performances are so wooden that things improve when Eric frickin' Roberts turns up with a bad wig," complained one British reviewer.

Yes, recent years have found Hollywood turning out a record number of feature films inspired by video games -- "BloodRayne," "Silent Hill" and "Alone in the Dark," among them. Meanwhile, video-game publishers have been cranking out a steady stream of games based on movies, including "Reservoir Dogs," "Scarface," "Jaws" and the recent "Superman Returns."

Everyone agrees Hollywood and the gaming industry are growing closer, the entertainment titans not just adapting each other's material but also adopting each other's storytelling and visual styles.

Yet, the mating of games and movies remains a rocky endeavor that has come to inspire distrust and derision in the minds of consumers who've learned the hard way that video games based on movies most often are mediocre at best. Movies based on video games have a worse track record.

Brandon Gray, president of Boxofficemojo.com, an online movie magazine and box-office reporting service, puts it bluntly: "There has yet to be a good movie made from a video game."

But in recent months, gaming companies and Hollywood types have begun forging creative partnerships of a different kind. Superstar directors Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and John Woo, as well as actor Vin Diesel, have signed deals with game developers and publishers in an attempt to find new and, one hopes, more successful ways to blend movies and games.

"We've got some people together who are going to figure out how to take the best lessons of filmic storytelling and the best lessons of games storytelling and create something which is a little of both and yet better than either," says Joseph Staten of Kirkland-based Bungie Studios about the recent partnership between Microsoft and Jackson. "We don't know what it's going to look like yet. But it's going to be a lot of fun to find out."

The history game

One need only look at history for plenty of reasons to remain skeptical.

Some of the worst video games sprouted from licensing partnerships with Hollywood. Back in 1982, for example, the video game adaptation of "E.T." was so bad that it's often blamed, at least in part, for the downfall of the Atari system and the gaming biz crash of 1983.

Looking the other direction, the 1993 film adaptation of Nintendo's iconic "Super Mario Bros." game was a massive flop, this despite the fact that the talented Bob Hoskins brought the mustachioed plumber Mario to big-screen life.

"It certainly made us a little gun-shy," says George Harrison, Nintendo of America's senior vice president of marketing. "We haven't done a movie deal since then for precisely that reason." (That doesn't include the "Pokémon" animated films for kids.)

So why make a movie into a video game or a video game into a movie in the first place?

Certainly, there are financial reasons. When a game company pays to license the rights to a popular movie, it does so knowing the popularity of the film and its surrounding publicity will help sell the game.

Unfortunately, that can mean little motivation to make a quality game. "You don't have to make them good because people are buying them because they recognize the name," says Michael Pachter, who studies the games industry as an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Boxofficemojo's Gray is equally cynical when it comes to movies adapted from games.

"Unfortunately, it's not about the quality of the movie, it's about the bottom line," he says. "You base a movie on a popular video game and you have a built-in audience."

Bad reviews or not, plenty of "Dead or Alive" fans are sure to throw their money at the film adaptation simply because they love the game franchise.

But game makers say that time pressures are frequently to blame for quality problems. A good game can take up to two years, or more, to make. By the time a movie has been greenlighted, they have to rush to release the game at the same time as the movie.

Plus, says Robin Kaminsky, executive vice president of publishing for Activision, film-to-game crossovers have more to offer than potential profits. "Fabulous characters, wonderful rich stories, stories and worlds that can be expanded in new directions," she says, pointing specifically to Activision's adaptation of "Spider-Man 2," which earned many kudos.

Chris Gray, an executive producer at Electronic Arts, points to the "Harry Potter" movies -- which he helped translate into successful and well-regarded games -- as an example. "People desperately want to go inside that world. Only a video game could truly give them the experience of being that character."

The same goes for the game version of "Superman Returns," which EA's Gray also worked on and which arrived on store shelves late last month.

"It's the only medium where you can truly inhabit the character," Gray says. "With 'Superman' we let you fly. So that makes it special."

Of course, many things have changed in recent years.

"Technology on the games side of things is moving to the point where the graphics we can put on the screen are approaching the special-effects levels of film," says Jason Hall, senior vice president of Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment.

In part, this is why video games -- whether they're based on movies or not -- are starting to implement film-style visuals and narratives like never before. In fact, many of today's top titles ("Prey," "Bully," "F.E.A.R") offer compelling stories along with compelling game play. They even provide something that actually approaches character development.

"The technology is finally allowing us to create the kind of storytelling moments we couldn't create before," says EA's Gray.

Getting better at it

As games place more importance on storytelling and character development, it seems only logical that they not only would make better fodder for film adaptations, but do a better job adapting movies to games.

"We're getting better at knowing what works and what doesn't," says Gray.

Hall agrees.

"Not all movies should be games and not all games should be movies," he says. "Now, Warner Bros. has a much better handle on how to make those determinations."

Warner Bros. decided that one movie that should be a game was "Superman Returns." It licensed the film's intellectual property to EA, which then took on the rather immense challenge of turning it into a video game.

"Superman hasn't had a great history of top-notch games," Gray says. "So we wanted it to be the best Superman game ever."

Easier said than done. The unique characteristics of movies and games make translating one into the other a difficult proposition. The game needs to be true to the film and also offer something beyond it. It has to be engaging as a story and fun to play.

"One strategy which we use on 'Superman' is to find the elements of the movie that people can connect to on an emotional level," Gray says. "But we also tried to really expand the universe."

Both Gray and Hall say they've seen games that have tried to stick too closely to the film to their detriment.

"If I've seen the movie, I don't want to replay it," Gray says. "We've really gone out of our way to make this faithful to the movie but not a literal adaptation. We've gone out of our way to have a number of twists and turns."

Alas, for all their efforts, the "Superman Returns" game has been greeted with chilly reviews.

"After the thrill of flying around Metropolis wears off, 'Superman Returns' is nothing more than a below-average, repetitive movie tie-in that doesn't even do the movie tie-in part well," wrote a reviewer for Gamespot.com.

It comes down to this, says Boxofficemojo's Brandon Gray: "A video game and a movie are two different things. Video games may have the trappings of a story but they're ultimately about playing, about hand-eye coordination."

Wes Nihei, editor in chief for GamePro magazine, agrees to a certain point. "You can't get away from the fact that one's interactive and one's passive and at some point the twain shall not meet."

'Halo' dreaming

But if Staten of Bungie Studios has his way, one game finally is going to prove that a video game can be translated into a quality film. And that game is "Halo."

"My goal is not just to make 'Halo the Movie' a great film adaptation of a great game," he says. "I really want it to be a great science-fiction action film. I want it to be a great movie in its own right."

Developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft, "Halo" and "Halo 2" (for which Staten was a lead writer and director) have sold 14.7 million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, spawned action figures, books and a graphic novel, and have helped drive Microsoft's Xbox machines off store shelves and into living rooms around the world.

And with "Lord of the Rings" director Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, signed on to executive produce the film version of "Halo," there could be hope on the adaptation horizon.

Chris Lee, group-product manager for Xbox at Microsoft, understands why so many people greet the notion of a movie adapted from a video game with skepticism, if not hostility.

"We realize there's not a great track record there," he says. "That's why it was so important to partner with somebody like Peter Jackson. It's about as close to a guarantee as we could get that this is going to be a high-quality movie with high-production values and good storytelling."

One of the most popular game properties released in recent years, the "Halo" games are gunplay-heavy sci-fi adventures that put the player in the boots of an armor-clad supersoldier known as the Master Chief, a man caught in a pitched battle against an alien collective known as The Covenant. The story is epic, the adventure is intense and the following the game has inspired is rabid.

More importantly, Staten and Lee believe the "Halo" games have the two most important things a movie needs: a deep, rich universe and compelling characters. (It was the compelling Lara Croft character that made the 2001 "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movie the success that it was and the closest there is to a "good" film adapted from a video game. Angelina Jolie's starring role probably didn't hurt, either.)

"For me, the Master Chief is like the Clint Eastwood -- Dirty Harry -- was for us when we were growing up," Lee says. "He could potentially be that for the kids growing up today."

As many times as he has seen good games turned into bad movies, GamePro editor Nihei says "Halo" has given him hope. "I think it could be a great movie."

But while "Halo" seems to hold such promise, its trip to the silver screen has been plagued by setbacks in the past month. The studios financing the film adaptation -- Universal and Fox -- pulled out of the project. Then Microsoft announced it had "mutually agreed" with Jackson and Walsh to put the project on hold "until we can fulfill the promise we made to millions of 'Halo' fans throughout the world that we would settle for no less than bringing a first-class film to the big screen." Its statement continued: "While it will undoubtedly take a little longer for 'Halo' to reach the big screen, we are confident that the final feature film will be well worth the wait."

And so the curse continues.

Different approaches

Still, consumers of video games and movies might see some twinkle of hope on the horizon. The past year has turned up some unique partnerships between Hollywood and the games industry. Rather than simply trying to adapt games straight to film or vice versa, some in these industries are trying to find their way to something different.

Spielberg, for example, has signed an agreement to bring his storytelling expertise to EA, where he will create three original games not based on films.

Woo and actor Chow Yun-Fat signed up with Midway games to help complete a sequel to their 1992 film "Hard-Boiled." In a unique twist, this sequel won't be a movie, but rather a gritty video game, "Stranglehold." It's scheduled to arrive in stores in February.

"I think this is like the best of both worlds," says Brian Eddy, the director of the "Stranglehold" project. "With this, we already have a following from the film but we're allowed to make our own story and we can take our time to make sure we do it right."

Action star Diesel has dipped his fingers in the biz as well by creating Tigon Studios, his own games production company dedicated to mixing the best film and gaming have to offer. Tigon has joined forces with Midway to create "The Wheelman," a game that stars a digitized Diesel as a badass driver who comes out of retirement to save a woman from his past. MTV Films and Paramount Pictures plan to develop a major motion picture in conjunction with the game.

Meanwhile, beyond the "Halo" movie, Jackson has signed an agreement with Microsoft to establish Wingnut Interactive, a studio dedicated to creating a new kind of interactive entertainment. He also has agreed to create with Microsoft an original entertainment property of mysterious specifications.

"It may be more gamelike, it may be more movielike," Lee says. "It'll likely be somewhere in between."

While consumers wait to see what these new collaborations from Game Land and Hollywood look like, Nihei has a bit of advice: "I think it is still buyers beware out there."

Winda Benedetti is a Seattle-based freelance writer who can be reached at Goodgirlfriday@gmail.com.