Hollywood Looks to Video Games

They are lazy. There is content. It’s a perfect marriage.

Submitted by jmfilm

Disney is in trouble. Paramount faces a sale. Both giants are laying off employees left and right. The summer box office schedule points to a weak year. Even the normally off-target pundits at NPR realize something is amiss with Hollywood. It might even be collapsing. With AI generated content around the corner, it will only get worse. This is a prison of their own making. They happily donned the ideological garments that taint every production. They relied so much on CGI that replacing it with pure AI visuals will be seamless. They have to get back to basics. They need good money makers to build back up. Recent trends might offer a path forward. Prepare for a wave of video game movies.

It sounds stupid, but the trend is there. The Sonic movie was a runaway hit grossing over $300 million with merchandise to sell. The Super Mario Brothers film cracked $1.3 billion as a perfect children’s movie. The Fallout franchise inspired an Amazon series with decent buzz. Hollywood is lazy. Hollywood wants IP that has a built in audience to guarantee a minimum for ticket sales to justify budgets. This is a match made in heaven.

One could point to the awful Halo series and deny this, but Hollywood will beat a trend into the dirt as long as they can make money. Just look at Disney’s handling of Marvel IP. There have been winners, and there will be more. There is a wealth of video games with giant fanbases or even just rabidly engaged fanbases. Consumer engagement and property visibility are already measured by a plethora of social media content or lack thereof. Special effects can bring anything to life now and look and move in a smooth manner. The extra kicker is that the rights to these properties are relatively cheap. That is what Hollywood needs now to guarantee winners and in the event of a flop, have a small loss.

In 2023, Hollywood took a property languishing in development limbo for years and produced “Five Nights at Freddy’s”. It was a giant success most importantly on a $20 million budget. This fit nicely into the Hollywood money maker genre of low budget horror. For the producers, this was a popular game with a built in audience of a decade of multimedia exposure, a deep backstory to mine for one film, and a Youtube ecosystem of influencers and content creators continuously promoting the film’s upcoming release. The filmmakers went so far as to cast a handsome Youtube nerd in the film in a bit part. Was there a deal in place to have him continuously make videos for his millions of subscribers about this game series and the upcoming film in exchange for his little part? Who knows, but what a cheap marketing angle for Hollywood.

Setting the broader Hollywood effect aside, was this a good film? Surprisingly, it was a well-made, normal horror film. Zero stars. You recognize faces from smaller roles decades ago. Adapting a video game is difficult, and for background, FNAF is simply a survival horror game where in multiple editions you are in one room at the helm of some electronics that keep evil robots at bay. You must survive the night. You can play through a FNAF game in one hour. The adaptation had to build in a story so you would identify and cheer on the lead, who is just an everyman since in the game it is a first person perspective that you are immersed in. The script did a good job with this to make it personal, and reviewers completely missed that the back story for the protagonist is actually a means to explain the backstory for the evil animatronics. There has to be a reason for the protagonist to not quite after the first couple of nights, and they write in a good little emotional reason. They make the leads connection to his sister the emotional core, and that contrasts to the generic American landscape setting.

The film does fail a bit with limited scares and not as much hide and seek chase. The potential for incredibly horrifying hide and seek sequences (like in the game) was high, and it did not deliver. There is the weird part befriending the evil animatronics, which took the edge off the horror element of animatronics coming to life. The genius of Hitchcock’s horror and suspense was that he made normal, everyday things and places we consider safe suddenly become death traps: wide open corn fields, showers, birds, sleepy Spanish missions, etc. The idea that Chuck E. Cheese comes to life and wants to kill you is perfect. It is a lurking feeling that ‘80s and ‘90s kids might have felt seeing them sing and move awkwardly between bites of pizza that had too much sugar in the sauce. A more true to the game adaptation still would have had to have an outside the restaurant storyline, which could have revealed clues into the horrific past of the place by having the lead do some local historical research. This would have removed the emotional core of the brother-sister story arc and made for a darker film. This could be the template for a sequel.

And there will be a sequel. This movie made too much money to not have a sequel. It has too much backstory and lore to not mine for a simple ninety minute horror film with a $20 million budget for pallets of cash from hungry consumers. The marketing campaign is too easy for Hollywood. They do not have to make trailers and buy ad spots in expensive television markets when all they have to do is throw crumbs at YouTube channels. This provides a template for studios. They love built in audiences. They love templates for generating hits. Many would love to see a ninety minute action movie adaptation of Gears of War that has the pathos of the original one minute ad from 2006. If this becomes the new hot trend for Hollywood, we will likely endure a lot of garbage adaptations just for the opportunity to see one gem.