Why Can't Hollywood Make a Good Video Game Movie?

Hmm, I don't play video games, but I do play board games. People that play board games say the same thing - you don't play a board game for the theme, you play it for the gameplay or the game mechanics (though a fun theme doesn't hurt).

This article makes it seem like it's almost inevitable for video game movies to be bad, almost as if there's some objective formula which dooms video game movies to failure. For example, the author mentions something like: "stray too far from the original and you get weird movies that alienate fans, but stick too closely to the original and you get something boring and overly game-like." Seems like a false dichotomy to me.

There's definitely a way to create a highly-compelling side story that "fulfills" the promise of an original series without being overly constrained by it. For example, Tell Tale Studios is a game company that is quite famous for making good side stories that latch onto existing franchises, and their Walking Dead video game is one of the best video game storylines I've ever played through. It seems like it's quite possible to turn good movies and good tv shows into compelling video games; surely this is possible in reverse as well! It's also really easy for me to imagine an alternate universe where video game adaptations are like comic-book or novel adaptations, which are capable of performing quite well.

I do think that making good movies that are entertaining and have artistic merit is always hard, and since the problem of making good movies is already not easy, adding additional constraints from a video game premise probably makes it more difficult, especially since film types are probably more likely to be passionate lovers of comics and books than they are to be passionate gamers. There's probably also a problem with the prestige of video game titles that makes it difficult to find good writing talent.

I've never played the game or seen the movie, but the trailer looks pretty bad to me.

If I were making a movie about that subject (and maybe this will make it clear why I'm not a producer), I'd go for more of an "Adaptation" style film. Viewers can't control time? Play it up, by (visually) admitting that the game powers like "rewind" are done on film through multiple takes, and stunt men, and editing. That's how you translate game to film, and this game mechanic provides the perfect opportunity.

So you've got a normal action film for the first X minutes, and then there's a fight scene, and Jake trips and flubs it, and we hear someone call "cut!", and you see everything freezes while the crew rush in to reset everything to 10 seconds earlier, and they run it again. The first time this happens, it's super quick, so the audience is left wondering if they really saw it or not. As the film goes on, it happens more often, and more extensively. Maybe sometimes the actor tries several times and then gives up and runs off stage, and a stunt man runs in. Maybe sometimes you expand and see that the whole thing is happening on an editing workstation, and they move clips around to make it look like everything worked, and then they hit "play" and you're back in the story.

Then at the very end, it zooms out to show the filmmakers watching what we just saw, and they say "Nah, nobody would ever believe that it all just worked out perfectly the first time like this". Fin.

If the whole point of PoP:SoT is the protagonist's ability to control time, film already has a way to do that. Don't try to just embed an old mechanic in the new medium. That's like building an interpreter for C, and calling it a day. You've got a native JMP here, so use it.

I think the incentives behind mainstream film-making would make that impossible. Studios are risk averse, they would rather focus on what makes a book marketable and palatable to the masses than successful, especially when dealing with a property without a guaranteed audience. No studio in their right mind would fund a trilogy based on a book few people would have heard of prior to the first film adaptation.

It might work on an alternative platform like Netflix, but not out of the studio system.

I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.