So... this has probably been known for quite a while, but according to this article, the upcoming animated Super Mario movie's release window is around year 2022, so there is a lot of time to think and speculate about what this movie is going to be like until its release date.

What are you all expecting from this movie? Do you think it'll be good? What do you think the plot will be? Posting this because I'm bored... and it's also my first time ever starting a discussion on this site.

Hamster6041 said:
So... this has probably been known for quite a while, but according to "This article"https://nordic.ign.com/news/22344/nintendo-reveals-release-window-for-super-mario-bros-animated-movie the upcoming animated Super Mario movie's release window is around year 2022.

What are you all expecting from this movie? Do you think it'll be good? What do you think the plot will be? Posting this because I'm bored... and it's also my first time ever starting a discussion on this site.

I thought Nintendo had no intention on doing another Mario movie after the live action version didnt do so well.[Even tho personally, it was a childhood favorite of mine.]
I would be invested fully if animated movie starts from the beginning and show us how Mario landed in the Mushroom Kingdom where he ended up saving Peach from Bowser. Similar to how Super Mario World the tv series did.

Jinx_Jackal said:
I thought Nintendo had no intention on doing another Mario movie after the live action version didnt do so well.[Even tho personally, it was a childhood favorite of mine.]
I would be invested fully if animated movie starts from the beginning and show us how Mario landed in the Mushroom Kingdom where he ended up saving Peach from Bowser. Similar to how Super Mario World the tv series did.

Hmm. That does sound like an interesting concept. The Mario franchise doesn't even really have a story or an official canon at all, so that would probably be fun to see.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of Illumination's work. They are the same animation studio that gave us minions and they've been riding that wave for almost 9 years now. I'm willing to bet that they will turn the goombas or toadspeople similar to how minions act.

So far, they've been mediocre with 3rd party properties. The Grinch movie wasn't anything special and neither was the Lorax. Just based on their track record, I'm afraid that this Mario movie will also turn out mediocre

Honestly, video game movies are trash in general. They are made by people that are out of touch with the world of video games, butchering the video game part of the movie. Just look at the Sonic movie, or the new Doom movie. It's all trash.

The one video game movie that I've watched was the Postal movie, and I can say that it was just like the game. The only good video game movie Uwe Boll has ever made. But that's just one specific example of a good video game movie, because Postal has a very specific trashy taste of humor (which I like).

randomguy85 said:
Honestly, video game movies are trash in general. They are made by people that are out of touch with the world of video games, butchering the video game part of the movie.

There shouldn't be noticable video game parts of the movie. It's a movie, not a game. It's based on an idea, in a setting. It's basically really fancy official fanfic. It's MEANT to be accessible even to people who've never played the games.

Personally, I enjoyed The Tomb Raider movie. My husband likes the Resident Evil movies, even if they're not fantastic. The first Silent Hill was pretty good.

Also, the pokemon franchise has like 20 movies that are all based on video games. They do a LOT of video game movies: including some Persona films, and Corpse Party.

Does that make movies like Blood Rayne good? Nope.

But that doens't mean that all video game movies ever will be bad...

For fun, I looked at all of the video game movies that wikipedia has listed. I did a very impromptu thing and, essentially, added the rottoen tomatos critic score, audience score and the metacritic scores together, then divided by 3 for a rough average.

Then I organized everything by date. Generally speaking, the older a movie is, the worse it did. There are a couple of exceptions -- 1995's Mortal Kombat, Silent Hill and the Resident Evil franchise are notable exceptions.

In the last decade? Almost all of these movies do pretty good, relatively speaking. Better, anyway, then the decade before.

the 2000-2010 range had a lot of video game movies -- about 2 a year. in the 9 years since we've only had 9 movies. (Pokemon will make 10)

Those 20 moves had an 'average' score (using my method) of 29 points, whereas the most recent decade? a score of 40.

These still aren't fantastic movies-- but that suggests an improvement over the years: movie makers are prioritizing quality over quantity.

that said.

randomguy85 said:
The one video game movie that I've watched was the Postal movie,

Wait.

You're saying all other video game movies are crap but you've only ever watched ONE video game movie???

post #1702924

Anyway, Postal, by my system, scored a 20. Far from the most awful, though: that goes to 2005's Alone in the Dark with a 6.67 (So close!) followed by 2003's House of the Dead with a 9. (BloodRayne, for those of you who have suffered through it, got a 12.6

tl;dr - Video game movies are pretty bad, but they've been steadily improving over the years, as people focus on quality over quantity. There are still several ENJOYABLE movies out there already, even if they're not necessarily "good". (after all, the enjoyment of a story or movie does not necessarily rely on the cinematography or the lack of plot holes... it's about how much fun we have along the way.)

This concludes today's episode of "Snow likes Spreadsheets too much"

Bring back Captain Lou!

SnowWolf said:
(That's a lot of text yo)

I think it should also be noted that this Mario movie will be fully animated and not live-action. I don't know why Hollywood keeps trying to bring video games into real life. All they gotta do is stay within the lore (at least related to the lore), the art medium, and concept. Is that too much to ask? :V

TheHuskyK9 said:
I think it should also be noted that this Mario movie will be fully animated and not live-action. I don't know why Hollywood keeps trying to bring video games into real life. All they gotta do is stay within the lore (at least related to the lore), the art medium, and concept. Is that too much to ask? :V

(It was a lot of text, lol. But I was curious, and this kinda stuff is fun to me sometimes!)

I honestly think it'll be fine.

Maybe not GREAT, but at least fine.

I've never seen the minions movies, but: I did like Despicable Me. And Sing was delightful. (it might not be new or unique or anything, but that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable.)

That said, Nintendo, from what *I* know, is pretty good about doing things The Right Way, so I think that if they're letting Illumination do this, It'll be Done Right.

SnowWolf said:
I've never seen the minions movies, but: I did like Despicable Me.

Thank your lucky stars. Simply because of how awful the minion movie was and how lackluster the sequels were, and how hard Illumination tried to ride them, I can't even stand the original.

Unfortunately it was financially successful, each one more than the last.

randomguy85 said:
Honestly, video game movies are trash in general. They are made by people that are out of touch with the world of video games...

I 100% agree with this.

randomguy85 said: ...butchering the video game part of the movie.

This, not so much, though it's a complaint I see often.

SnowWolf said:
There shouldn't be noticable video game parts of the movie. It's a movie, not a game. It's based on an idea, in a setting. It's basically really fancy official fanfic. It's MEANT to be accessible even to people who've never played the games.

This is true, and it's true for any form of media getting the Hollywood treatment, be it a comic, a play, a historical figure or event, a book, anything: you can't just transcribe something else literally into film. You have to adapt it.

Each art-form has fundamental structural differences, all with different strengths and weaknesses when in comes to telling a story. If you were making a film adaptation from a book and use the source material as a literal screenplay, the results are going to be clunky at best. Games are no exception to this.

And as you say, a film has to be able to hold up on its own. A story that requires you to have intimate knowledge of the source material to appreciate it is a pretty lousy story.

Anyway, I think the reason video game movies have been so bad is due to a lot of factors, but I'm convinced the main one by far is far out of touch the people making and financing them are. It's simple: the executive suits that produce video game movies have, in their vast majority, never touched a single one in their life.

These are cynical, rich old men we're talking about here. When they hear "video game", they think of stereotypical teenagers who want nothing but fast, dumb action, from half-remembered 1990s adverts. As they consider games and the people who play them idiotic, the films are produced accordingly. To broaden the target audience beyond the core fans, they usually double down on the cut-and-paste "dumb action" - simply because they don't see what else a video game adaptation could possibly be.

This also creates a vicious cercle of sorts: since most video game movies have been made with this mindset, leading mostly to commercial failures because of their poor quality, the producers conclude that they failed not because of low effort, but because video game movies have limited appeal, leading them to invest even less effort on future adaptations.

The Hitman films are a great example of this mentality. A Hitman movie got made on TWO separate occasions, and they were both terrible. They were poorly made, cliché ridden action films, turning agent 47 into a stereotypical action hero, complete with bullet time dodges, one-liners and explosion-jumping.

I find this example particularly tragic, because I can think of no other franchise more deserving of the silver screen treatment than Hitman. If they had actually tried to capture the spirit of the games, what makes them appealing to people that play them, they wouldn't have made crappy action movies, because Hitman hardly has any gun fights in it. It's about patience, and about finding the most convoluted and complicated ways of assassinating targets. There's a lot of fun and humor in the games, but it doesn't derive from the main character acting goofy, but from this huge bald guy acting dead serious no matter how crazy the situation or how outrageous his disguise is. And there's definitely a hugely entertaining film to made there somewhere.

At the moment, producers just see "video game" + "guns" + "killing people" = dumb action movie.

As time goes by and the executive positions get more and more replaced by people who actually love and understand the appeal of games, we should get better quality adaptations. But it's going to take time.

Shyguys and Shygals, Them doing normal things and expressing blue collar workmanship, and a skit of a shyguy and a shygal not being shy in anything they do, breaking the fourth wall, and ultimately near the end a lot of them running around in circles and screaming while Luigi stares at them in a confused manner.