I’m glad for the latest Mario movie entirely because of Jack Black as Bowser.
The Resident Evil films were pretty good, too. The Doom movie was at least as much fun as your standard B-movie shoot’em’up. Uncharted and the first Tomb Raider could have stood in for any Mummy and was head and shoulders above the last two Indiana films. The Street Fighter and Mortal Combat movies were middle-of-the-road genre films.
I don’t think Zelda has to fail on its face. But I think there’s a lot of places where the screenwriters can go wrong. Translating the dungeons in a Zelda game to the big screen will be difficult in a way a Tomb Raider or Far Cry aren’t. And working side-characters into a game that’s very explicitly a solo adventure will be hard.
I think they’d have had an easier time with Dragon Quest. I’m very confident they could make a good Metroid movie, since that’s just reskinning Aliens 2. But there are definitely examples of game-to-movie films working, so long as they fit with a traditional Hollywood script. Zelda just doesn’t do that well.
Zelda has a such potential to fail on a full feature that I don’t keep my expectation that high.
Silent Hill is still the only movie I consider good, because the original medium had a huge amount of content that match full feature requirement.
I’m glad for the latest Mario movie entirely because of Jack Black as Bowser.
The Resident Evil films were pretty good, too. The Doom movie was at least as much fun as your standard B-movie shoot’em’up. Uncharted and the first Tomb Raider could have stood in for any Mummy and was head and shoulders above the last two Indiana films. The Street Fighter and Mortal Combat movies were middle-of-the-road genre films.
I don’t think Zelda has to fail on its face. But I think there’s a lot of places where the screenwriters can go wrong. Translating the dungeons in a Zelda game to the big screen will be difficult in a way a Tomb Raider or Far Cry aren’t. And working side-characters into a game that’s very explicitly a solo adventure will be hard.
I think they’d have had an easier time with Dragon Quest. I’m very confident they could make a good Metroid movie, since that’s just reskinning Aliens 2. But there are definitely examples of game-to-movie films working, so long as they fit with a traditional Hollywood script. Zelda just doesn’t do that well.