You gotta be kidding me: ANOTHER Street Fighter movie?!

Watch Micheal Clarke Duncan sink his career
Oscar buzz is in the air right now. Who’ll come out on top? Heath Ledger’s amazing Joker performance? The outrageous portrayal of a dude, playin’ a dude, disguised as a dude from Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder? Or that Slumdog movie that I didn’t hear squat about until award season? Time will tell. We all know what movies can easily become Oscar bait- and rarely are we ever surprised by the winners. Admit it, we all knew Forest Gump would steal the gold from Pulp Fiction those many years back. As long as its sappy, has an all star ensemble cast, foreign, has a retarded-or gay-or otherwise tragic character (played by Sean Penn, Tom Hanks or some newer actor with a hard to pronounce name), then it’s a sure bet for an Academy Award. What amazes me is that the comedy genre gets overlooked nearly every damn year- comedies that make millions of dollars more than say, Million Dollar Baby.

One film that has yet to even get nominated for an Academy Award is any film based on a video game. If your familiar with any of these movies than its certainly not hard to see why. Maybe these films might get a technical nod, but I’ve yet to hear about them and besides who the hell cares about the technical Oscars? Exactly… moving on.

The problem is… I don’t think anyone has REALLY clamored from a video game to film translation of any kind. Perhaps the serious fan boys of the Mario games begged for a live action movie but a majority of the players couldn’t have cared less either way. Those fan boys suddenly were rudely greeted in 1993 with The Mario Bros film and if that wasn’t enough The Wizard was just a 90 minute commercial for the then upcoming Mario Bros 3 game (and oddly, it worked). John Leguizamo and Fred Savage are still trying to shake off those crumbs of shit.

Did anyone really ask for these films? Was it even worth the millions of dollars and man hours to make them? The only time that fans asked, fans got and fans were pleased was Mortal Kombat. It wasn’t Citizen Kane but in terms of game-based films its fucking close. Maybe the same could be said for the CGI animated Final Fantasy, but if it wasn’t for that features amazing visual spectacle than it would have died a quiet death in theaters and never would have become a gamers’ favorite DVD.

Well Hollywood doesn’t think that the pure and interactive storytelling of video games hasn’t been stripped, raped and strangled enough. This month the un-asked for Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li will come to theaters and most likely will TRY, TRY, TRY to be worth your 9 bucks but it won’t. This is pseudo-reboot of the dismally awful Street Fighter movie made back in 1994 (the one with French Canadian actor Van Damme as American air force soldier Guile). Those who remember 94’ know that the movie was horrible, hell I was only 13 and I thought it was crap. At 13 ANYTHING could have impressed me. What ruined it all was that the makers of the film felt the need to have ALL the fucking characters from the game be part of the story- which any screenwriter will tell you is an awful idea. This latest film seems to focus its story on Chun Li which might give the movie something to work with, but still even if its good it’ll still not generate much buzz outside of the gamer community. The point is, and my question through this whole article is “Who the fuck asked for this?”.

While games- like Mario Bros- have very little material in them to become movies that doesn’t stop them from being made. However some games have stories to them that are worthy of the silver screen. The problem is, once the film is in the hands of a director, and a producer, all hell breaks loose. These men and women of Hollywood don’t play video games and don’t care how the original story goes, they’ll just simply write one that suits them. Max Payne came out last year and wasn’t very loyal to the original game story, and nor was Doom two years prior. The original story to 'Payne was action packed, tragic, and spoke high volumes of government espionage (something that today’s politically charged world needs) however the movie reportedly is more about drugs and action rather than the suspense that kept us all playing. The trick that directors and writers need to follow is the same thing that keeps people playing the game should be the same tricks that keep us watching films, its formula that works in films that even ARE NOT based on games. We keep playing games to see what is next for us in the next level- we keep watching a movie to see what will happen to our protagonist next. The two genres DO go hand in hand.

So what games deserve to be green lit and might generate box office success? I have picked a few- mind you most of these games are my personal faves. Also bear in mind however just because I love the game doesn’t mean I will include it on this list. I love Tetris- there is NO movie in Tetris, just a Family Guy sketch. I’ve also included some reasoning as to why it should be made and also how I would make it, if I had such Hollywood muscle. Think of these upcoming entries as me being the producer of these stories. Since most of these studios nowadays can’t seem to come up with anything new it might be worth some of those studio heads to take a gander at this list and maybe (you better) write me a damn check. Couple million should be fine…

(stay tuned)