New Post has been published on http://elitewing.com/dear-hollywood-please-stop/
Dear Hollywood: Please Stop
Sometimes you have to stop while your behind, so very far behind. Lets say you run across a cute girl/guy and you decide to do the obvious thing and hit on them. After flashing your wad of money or political clout, the poor victim says yes. You then proceed to take your date out on a fabulously expensive dinner. Each entree is $50, the appetizer starts at $30 and you then order a $300 bottle of wine because well, that’s just how you ROLL. However, the appetizer has maggots in it, the entree shows up burnt and your date greedily drinks all the wine and then upchucks on your $2000 dinner attire. At this point the logical thing would be to go home and pretend it didn’t happen. But do you? Nope! The next day you find the exact same kind of person, expecting a different outcome. If you did that in real life – Your friends (the ones that still like you) would be calling you a “Grade-A-Idiot”. Unless you live in California, then your name is just Hollywood.
Yes the video game industry is a billion dollar industry, one that is growing to rival music and films. But if one thing is becoming more and more apparent its the simple fact that Hollywood and video games do not make good bedfellow (at least not all the time). Street Fighter, Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros, where do you draw the line and accept failure? For every Silent Hill there’s a Street Fighter: Legend of Chun li and Doom. Stop, just STOP. Haven’t you learned your lesson? The sad part is that video games CAN make good movies, but you can’t seem to take them seriously. There lies the irony, the source material is good enough to green-light millions of dollars but not good enough to stay true to it! What I fail to understand is who you are trying to appease, the gamers or the general public? Because from this vantage point you’re failing miserably at both.
What gamers want is simple, painfully simple. They simply want you to RESPECT the game you base your movie on. They want actors that look like their characters, they want the plot preserved, and for the movie to have those “Oh Snap!” moments that made the game itself famous. You don’t have to keep EVERYTHING the same. I mean, yeah we’ll complain but that’s in our nature. We’ll eventually accept the small changes in return for the big ones staying true. I mean look at X-Men, the comic book fans didn’t abandon the first movie when you ditched the yellow spandex for black leather. Neither would gamers if you decided to give the guys from Double Dragon regular clothes. Somethings we know just don’t work outside of our console. However that’s not a blank check to change the names of the central characters and change the background (I’m looking at you Prince of Persia).
Gamers are fiercely loyal, but we’ll drop your movie like a hot piece of poo if you disrespect us. How well did Street Fighter do again? Yea that’s what happens when you cast Taboo from Black Eyed Peas as Vega. We took that $9.00 and bought aspirin instead. You know, for the headache of hearing our favorite franchise being murdered by critics. The thing is, we want the same thing you do. We want to be able to go see something like Halo, or Metal Gear Solid in the movie theaters. We want to be able to share it with non gamers and have them say “Wow that’s awesome”, and then we can reply “I know! They captured the game perfectly! In fact I bought it for us to play in comparison”. That’s right, we want to be nerdy like that.
But I can see in your eyes that your heart isn’t swayed. I know you’re looking at my prized Devil May Cry and Castlevania. Well you can’t have them until we layout some new ground rules.
First off, stop casting generic actors in roles they don’t belong in. Stop assuming no one will see a movie without a big name in it. Remember Saw? Jeepers Creepers? Yea that’s right, good profitable movies with “B” movie actors. Cast someone who actually looks the part. And if it’s an action movie, please PLEASE hire someone who can actually fight. I’ll go to Devil May Cry starring Scott Adkins. Does he look like Dante? He’s close, but at least I know he’s gonna kick ass. Just have it make sense. Why was Jake Gyllenhaal cast as the prince again? He’s neither an action star nor Persian. Or anywhere close. That brings me to my next point.
Stop assuming that people won’t see the movie if there’s no white people in it. I mean seriously, Jake G as a Persian? Its kind of insulting really, black face for the new millennium. I thought you learned your lesson after casting Xi Xiang in Memoirs of a Geisha.
Third thing, let someone from the games work on the movie script. Most big name games these days have plots like movies. Its pretty much premade for you like bag popcorn. You didn’t have to make the Prince an orphan to create a plot. The original, boy-unleashes-sand-hell is more adequate, and a lot more fun. Respect the source material and the nerds will respect you. Not only will we see it, but we’ll tell all our friends. Remember all the money Dark Knight made? Yea that’s because of us. No, really. Nerd power.
Those three things are all you really need. We can let things go, I mean come on, no gamer asks why the guards can’t tell there’s a random cardboard box in the middle of a top-secret lab, or how Master Chief pee’s in that suit. So we can certainly let go of some base changes. Again, we’ll bitch, but there will be smile and delight behind it. I swear.
Just do the right thing and give this relationship a chance. TRUST US.
P.S. Some things you should know. There was no Devil May Cry 2, Sons of Liberty had no Raiden (it was Snake in disguise), Tink should die in the first 5 minutes of Legend of Zelda and if you make Alucard a long-lost descendant of the Belmonts we will find you.
