Weekly Dip: The Core Problem with Video Game Adaptations

There's been little movement in the Box Office rankings this week. Despite the presence of new blood entering the arena the estalbished players have continued to cominate.

1. Deadpool & Wolverine (Weekend Gross £8 million)
2. Despicable Me 4 (Weekend Gross £2.6 million)
3. Twisters (Weekend Gross £1.2 million)
4. Inside Out 2 (Weekend Gross £939,000)
5. Longlegs (Weekend Gross £570,000)

Yes, despite the alleged charms of Zachary Levi in Harold and the Purple Crayon the Box Office reamins as static as ever. With Deadpool and Wolverine continuing to dominate while the other contenders duked it out among the family and adult film demographics. Likely fearing death by irrelevance most major studios are still holding back their releases. With the only fresh blood being the aforementioned Harold and the undeniably niche animation Kensuke's Kingdom. 

All that is set to change this friday though with the appearence of M. Night Shamylan's latest thriller Trap, romantic fare in the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us and the subject of this week's column Borderlands. Despite a stacked cast and more marketing than you can shake a stick at the video game adaptation has already drawn fierce criticsm from preview screenings. However it raises the much more interesting question of why video games have had such a challenging history when it comes to adaptation.

The Core Problem with Video Game Adaptations 

Adapting the popular video game franchise Borderlands into a feature film should have been the easiest win of the year. Set on the wasteland planet of Pandora the games story is deliberately broad, you're a vault hunter looking for a treasure vault, in order to create a framework for fighting your way through hordes of bandits, mutants and monsters with a variety of colourful weapons and abilities. So logically, if you want to adapt it you grab some of the game's more distinct characters and have them fight their way through a seies of action setpieces with the same broad goal. Easy right?

Well no, for starters the characters you pick to help the film have to be enjoyable enough for an audience to invest in their fate. Not necessarily likable or compelling, we just have to enjoy watching them do their thing. Keanu Reeves has scowled his way through four John Wick movies on the flimliest of tragic back stories simply because the sheer speactacle of his ability is draw enough. With Borderlands director Eli Roth seems to have stuck to the paper-thin characterisation of the original game, the only modification being to fit the...let's say interesting casting choices. So the usually stoic Roland becomes yet another explosive Kevin Hart performance, Cate Blanchett's siren Lilith does little more than scowl and pose than an animated action figure.

So you can't enjoy watching the characters regardless of how good the actual action is. And by all accounts the action is not even that good. Roth, famous for small-scale horror films, directs his action incoherently in a blaze of imemorable set pieces. This is the one thing Borderlands needed to get right, no one was expecting Citizen Kane levels of storytelling. What they were expecting was a big screen version of the anarchic, colourful action of the games. Characters engaging in consequence-free violence against a series of unique and increasingly deranged psychopaths. To not even manage that demonstrates a serious failure to grapple with even the most basic elements of the source material.

Roth, of course is not alone in this. Hollywood has been mangling video games from the very beginning. Super Mario Bros (1993) relocated the bright, simplistic world of the games to a grimy 80s dystopian underworld. The Hitman adaptation ignored the core mechanic of invisibly manouvering through elbaorate locations to set up complicate, untraceable assasinations. The Resident Evil films largely set up it's own, increasingly insane internal cannon seperate from the events or characters of the games. Time and time again films seem much more interested in reworking games into more familiar genre films than nailing why the source material is so successful.

This is not to say that the essential mechanics need to always be translated to film. A theoretical Bioshock film shouldn't stop every twenty minutes to watch the lead playing Pipe Mania. But it should convey the feeling of a lone being trapped in a place driven mad by Objectivist philosophy while relying on the product of that very philosophy to survive. Not easy stuff, granted, but then why are you making a Bioshock film and not Rando McJack's Undersea Shootout? 

I don't expect any of this to make a blind bit of difference to the bigwigs in Hollywood who, at their most cynical, view video games as another reliable IP to mine. But on the off chance that the directors, writers and actors tasked with bringing these projects to life actually give a shit, I hope they understand that what they should be adapting, first and foremost, is the experience.

A Borderlands game should feel like the frantic, comical experience of trying to survive on Pandora, a Portal game should feel like trying to navigate your way to freedom via portals, a Legend of Zelda game should make you feel like a lost hero building up your skills and arsenal until you're ready to fight Gannondorf. 

Video Game adaptations will never by one-to-one translations. That's the nature of adaptation. But the very least the creative teams could do is try to capture the essence of what players love about the games they play. 

Weekly Dip: Downey Heralds Marvel's Doomsday

If there is any indication that blockbuster season has brought a lull to the industry it's the fact that the biggest story in movies is still an announcement from July. Before that though here's how the weekly box office shook out.

1. Deadpool & Wolverine (Weekend Gross £12.6 million)
2. Despicable Me 4 (Weekend Gross £3.1 million)
3. Twisters (Weekend Gross £1.5 million)
4. Inside Out 2 (Weekend Gross £1.1 million)
5. Longlegs (Weekend Gross £723,000)

Yep, as expected Deadpool and Wolverine cleaned house on it's opening weekend giving Marvel Studios it's biggest opening in two years. A badly needed boost to the company that's been struggling post-Endgame, post-pandemic, post-losing multiple stars for a variety of reason. In the family market Despicable Me 4 continues to dominate on the basic of strong IP reconition and broad appeal. Love 'em or hate 'em the Minions are as ubiquitous as it comes and will likely keep Dreamworks drowning in merch money for the next few years.

The only real surprise of this weeks Box Office contenders is Longlegs continuing it's respectable run for a mid-budget horror. While other contenders this year such as MaXXXine and Abigail couldn't get out of cinemas fast enough. Turns out leaving a good film running long enough for busy people to actually catch a screen yields better profits than a lightning-fast run followed by a dump onto streaming. 

Downey, Herald of Marvel's Doomsday

Shockingly the biggest news of this week is probably something that feels old at this stage in the news cycle (that stage been a mere six days later). San Diego Comic Con 2024 turned out to be a bumper event for Marvel, amid the early box office projections for Deadpool & Wolverine, an all-star panel for Captain America: Brave New World and the news that the Russo Brothers would be returning to direct the next two Avengers films. The centrepiece though was their coverage of the upcoming Fantastic Four film due in July 2025. Attendees were the first to learn the official release date as well as the intruigung title of Fantastic Four: First Steps. They also got to see some early footage which proved that the film would be partially set in an alternate history version of the 1960s.

However the Fantastic Four are almost inseperable from their recurring Marvel villain Victor Von Doom and the studio pulled out all the stops to reveal him in all his glory. A masked figure in green marched onto the stage, flanked by minions before pulling it off to reveal that the iconic character would be played by none other than Robert Downey Jr, last seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe dying heroicly after a decade long stint playing Iron Man. 

It was a move the elicited excitement and confusion among fans. Comic book afficiandos began wildly speculating on how the franchise would connect the deceased tech-billionaire superhero to the ruler of Latvaria. More cynical commentators remarked on what a desperate move it was from a studio that had been floundering for the last few years. While elsewhere on the internet a certain flavour of fan was up in arms that Marvel had so casually dicarded the Kang Dynasty, which I guess they were now suddenly invested in. 

The truth was that this was indeed something of a desperate move on the part of Marvel. While Deadpool & Wolverine would likely put them back in the black, the comic book movie studio, more than any other, thrives on a consistent prescence in the zeitgeist. Marvel relies heavily on a dedicated community of bloggers and journalists to analyse and speculate on its moves. A nerd industrial complex pouring over decades of comics to predict, explain and react to their every move. The announcement of Downey's return is the spark that community needs to get its fires not just lit but roaring hot.

And Marvel needs those fires hot again because after the slam dunk that was Avenger's Endgame, the studio has been struggling to decide on its next move. Promising new heroes like Shang Chi and Ms Marvel don't seem to have been given the space to make a name for themselves. Yelena Belova (AKA new Black Widow) has been shackled to the upcoming Thunderbolts film. The studio's attempt at serialised streaming has had diminishing returns while the films themselves seem to have been getting progressively worse. What's worse two actors who were intended to be the lynchpin of the franchise for the next decade are no longer available. Chadwick Boseman, now immortalised as the hero Black Panther, tragically died in 2020. While the actor portraying the new Thanos-level villain Kang was publicly convicted of assault in 2023.

Marvel needed to pull out something big, something that would set the stage for the future of the MCU so they went back to an actor that had helped elevate the franchise into the behemoth it is now. Bringing Downey back is the perfect storm of safe, relaible options that would also set the media ablaze and let them dominate industry headlines again. For me personally it is disappointing to not see one of the biggest entities in filmmaking try to bring in some new blood. Relying on increasingly aging established actors is the reason the Indiana Jones franchise has become such a bloated, hollow parody of itself. It's the reason IP is so much of a bigger factor in the industry than star power.

Plus, it's hard to not see this as having a jarring effect when it comes time to actually watch Doom onscreen. The immersion broken by constantly wondering when/if they're going to explain why he looks and sounds so much like Tony Stark.

In short last week's major announcement accomplished what it needed to for Marvel Studios. For people who wanted a well-crafted comic book story, well, they were left still wanting.