For years now, people have been taking video games and turning them into movies.  The most notable of these are the Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider series.  The most successful video game adaptation to date is the first Tomb Raider movie.

Tomb Raider

W00t were done with the boring intro!

I was looking around the other day to see if there were going to be any good movies coming out over the next few years.  I must admit, I was surprised, and not in a good way.  Sort of like if your mother had come up to you when you were 26 and told you that you were in fact, adopted.  Not that there is anything wrong with being adopted, but were this to happen, your whole world would be flipped upside down, and you’d probably be a bit confused.  I was left with a feeling like this when I discover that over the next year or so the following movies are planned to be made:

• Far Cry (August 1, 2008)
• Max Payne (October 17, 2008)
• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (February 27, 2009)
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (June 19, 2009)
• Tekken (2009)

While I appreciate and accept both movies and video games as creative media, I don’t think there should really be much cross over.  For example, I thought Max Payne was a good game, dark, but good.  Somehow I can’t see it transitioning into a movie though.  One of the best aspects of the game was the fact that it was realistic, apart from the bullet time.  But being a video game, we all accepted the bullet time because it was freaking awesome!  Now you’d think that since I said above that it was realistic, it would be the perfect candidate for a movie.  I’m not so sure.  While it was enjoyable game play, that’s what it was meant to be, game play.  You could start to become the character on your quest for vengeance.  The places you were taken and the things that you did seemed to work in game.  But I just can’t honestly see it working as a movie.  The dream sequences were positively the best part of the entire game.  You could see how much of an effect the death of his wife and kid had on him.  Sorry to sound redundant, but I don’t know how they plan to make that work for the movie.

Now, I won’t say that these movies are going to suck.  On the contrary, I hope that they’ll be great.  But knowing how bad some of the video game adapted movies have been in the past, I’m not sure if any of these are going to be worth seeing.