The latest videogame franchise to try and conquer the movies? That’d be Uncharted – and it has quite a job ahead of itself.
For a gaming series that wears its movie influences so heavily on its bruised and rugged shoulders, the Uncharted franchise has seemingly been egging for a film adaptation since the first tie protagonist Nathan Drake moseyed onto the PlayStation.
Drake is, after all, someone akin to Indiana Jones in his adventuring, just contemporary and without Sony having to fork out for the Indy licence as a result. The set pieces of the games, the plots, the character twists: as excellent as they are, let’s just say that the DVD collection of developer Naughty Dog is not likely to be on the small size.
Uncharted is published by Sony of course, and Sony in turn owns a movie studio. It was always going to be a matter of when, not if, this particular series made the jump, especially as the games themselves became stellar hits. It’s taken a lot of false starts to get to the moment we’re at now where the film is under a year away (the film has gone through five or six different directors during development). And as the first trailer for it demonstrates, this particular apple doesn’t appear to have fallen too far from the PlayStation tree. Terrible metaphor, but we’re committed to it now.
Here’s that trailer…
With the release of a new videogame-to-film adaptation inevitably comes the discussion about why this path has more often than not led to some kind of graveyard.
Since the first games that were made into movies – Double Dragon and Super Mario Bros, back in the early 90s – the fail rate has been pretty spectacular. Just look at some of the high profile releases that have crashed and burned on the big screen, in spite of notching up big sales on gaming systems: Max Payne, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, Prince Of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Hitman, Need For Speed… you name them, the list is not a short one.
However, I’d also contend that the narrative suggesting all videogame adaptations are poor is false. In fact, if you look at Detective Pikachu, from the world of Nintendo’s Pokemon, I’d suggest for a start that’s a fine family feature. The recent Werewolves Within meanwhile is based on an UbiSoft game, and the film’s won sizeable plaudits, even if barely anyone has seen it. At least one of the three Tomb Raider films to date is decent, Duncan Jones’s Warcraft movie had its fans, and Dwayne Johnson smashing his way away Rampage is not without pleasure. Also, whilst the film had problems, there were moments in the Silent Hill movie that briefly crackled to life.
But there’s nothing – perhaps Werewolves Within aside – close to a slam dunk there. There isn’t an example of a game that’s both been reflected well on the big screen and won an audience of size over. Some have actively yearned to do so as well. Another Dwayne Johnson-headlined action-fest, Doom, had a visual styling pretty much ripped from the game it was drawn from. Even the tepid Need For Speed was looking to zero in on the game mechanics from the long-running motoring racing series.
Films have been trying to get this right for 30 years now, driven by Hollywood studios who see the size of the gaming market and quite fancy a slice of some of that money. Problem is those studios – watching as Grand Theft Auto helps itself to billions – haven’t worked out how to do it.
What’s more there’s little getting away from the fact that games are far better at borrowing from videogames than the other way around. The cinematics of a Hideo Kajima game, for instance, positively scream frustrated filmmaker, and a franchise such as Saint’s Row makes no bones about ripping the piss out of a blockbuster such as Armageddon. Right back too to when the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan inspired a major sequence in Call Of Duty forerunner Medal Of Honor, the lineage from big screen to console has been clear.
The other way around? Well, the Uncharted trailer suggests some lifting from the middle of its source particular gaming saga, but it’s almost like it’s coming full circle. Much as the last Tomb Raider became a big screen take on a videogame that in turn was a videogame take on a big screen venture, so Uncharted continues to try and blur those lines.
It’s all a far cry – chortle – from when legendarily piss-poor filmmaker Uwe Boll licenced game after game for terrible movie after terrible movie (his IMDB page does a better job of presenting the detail of this than I ever could). Now we’re in an era when gaming publishers are far more protective of their properties, not least because they can see the pot of gold if they get this right. As much as the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed film was maligned, the 2016 movie still helped itself to over $200m at the global box office.
We’re still a long way away from Marvel-sized juggernauts though, but maybe Uncharted can arrest that. It’s got a big movie star or two – Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg (once touted to take the lead many, many years ago) – a director in Ruben Fleischer who knows his way around a blockbuster, and, in theory, quite the build in audience. But as Hollywood knows, we’ve been here before…