With Detective Pikachu out in the world and capturing everyone’s hearts with its pitch-perfect live-action take of the titular character, it seems like the curse of the “bad video game movie” has finally been broken.
Or has it? Well if we go by numbers then the answer is no.
Detective Pikachu currently has a mediocre score of 52 on Metacritic, which quantifies it as decidedly average. It has a more flattering score of 64% over at Rotten Tomatoes but that’s misleading as that site counts anything above a 6/10 as a positive review rather than taking an average of all review scores like Metacritic.
That being said, Detective Pikachu is still the second best reviewed video game movie ever on Metacritic (behind Mortal Kombat‘s score of 58) and the best on Rotten Tomatoes so its got that going for it.
But still, it appears that the “bad video game movie” curse is still upon us and it looks like it will linger around for at few lifetimes at least.
Sorry, buddy.
After nearly three decades of making video game movies, why has the jump from video game to big screen been so difficult? I mean I enjoy bad video game movies for the laughs but I still yearn for a good film to come along one day.
You can point at reasons ranging from studios meddling around with the source material too much to filmmakers completely misunderstanding the whole point of the game they’re adapting, but I think the biggest reason is because video gaming is a medium that simply doesn’t translate to film.
When you watch a movie you are a passive participant, but when you play a video game you are an active participant. You form your own narratives and take control of your experience when you play a game and that kind of control is taken away from you when watching a film.
That whole viseral first-hand experience of playing a game just doesn’t translate to the screen because a movie can’t capture the same feeling you had when you play games like DOOM, Tomb Raider, Sonic, or Super Mario.
Beyond the contrasting user experiences, video game stories are also far too complex to effectively translate into a movie. Games are able to take the time to build a universe in which the player can inhabit and many different stories, events, and character arcs are able to run concurrently without everything collapsing into itself. Films however are limited by runtimes, meaning that things need to run at a brisk pace.
To put things into perspective, scripts for video games are several thousands of pages long and cover everything in great detail whereas film scripts are usually about 110 pages and are as streamlined as possible.
This is why video game movies either have well-fleshed out universes but poor characters(like Detective Pikachu and Warcraft) or good characters but a bland universe (like Tomb Raider). There simply is no way to fit everything in.
There’s also the unfortunate few movies that have both awful characters and a bland universe but I won’t name and shame them here. Except for Sonic. Poor Sonic.
Things aren’t looking good for the Sonic movie.
The sheer scope of a video game these days means it is simply impossible to properly capture every important detail in a two-hour film while ensuring that it works as a “movie” as well.
It is this problem that I truly believe we won’t see a good video game movie in our lifetime or the next because it is puzzle that’s next-to-impossible to solve. That being said, perhaps the solution lies in the form of TV shows.
TV shows can run far longer than movies, have the freedom to squeeze in material that would’ve been cut out in a film, and are able to tell far more complex stories.
With The Witcher series coming out later this year, it’ll be interesting to see whether we should stop putting stock into video game movies and start paying attention to video game TV shows.