Skip to Content

New to the Mac? Check out TUAW's Mac 101
AOL Games

christopher-lambert posts

Upcoming MMO movies (and why they'll suck)

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, City of Heroes, EverQuest, Business models, Culture, Events, real-world, Lore, New titles, Opinion, Massively meta

Dorothy Parker once said "The only 'ism' Hollywood believes in is plagiarism." While not technically plagiarism, the practice of mining popular properties of other media is a time-honored mainstay of Hollywood's. Why invent a new franchise when you can adapt one that already exists? Well, if we're talking about translating videogames to cinema, there are at least 3 reasons against that we can think of right away: Street Fighter: The Movie, Double Dragon, and Doom. Oh, and the entire body of work of Uwe Boll.

With such a history of failure, why does Hollywood keep banking on videogames as good sources of material? Because it's always desperate for the next big hit, and adaptation is seen as being easier than originality, even though by now it's apparent that it's not quite as simple as it seems. An even better question is: why exactly don't these translations work? What is it about games that makes for poor films? Let's see if we can answer this question and assess the potential success/failure of some upcoming MMO movies.

Massively Features


Featured Games

Events Calendar

NameDate
Fallen Earth Launch Q2 2009
Global Agenda Closed Beta July 2009
CrimeCraft Launch Aug 25 2009
Champions Online Launch Sep 1 2009
Cities XL EU Launch Sep 3 2009
Aion Launch Sep 22 2009
Earth Eternal Open Beta Q3 2009

Massively Podcast


New episodes every Wednesday. Now playing:
Episode 59, for Wednesday, July 1st, 2009.



Archive | RSS | iTunes | Zune

Featured Galleries

One Shots
Hands on with Cities XL
Earthrise wallpapers
Runes of Magic: The Weeping Coast
Aion Beta: Asmodian Ascension Quest
Aion Beta: Asmodae
Aion Beta: Crafting your Asmodian
Runes of Magic: The Elven Prophecy
GamerDNA: A brief look at free to play games