There’s a new era of video game movies coming, and we’re hoping they will turn the genre around, much like X-Men turned around the comic book film. We think there could be a great video game movie down the road, but we’re not sure Need For Speed’s going to be it.
Watching the Need For Speed trailer, it looks like a Fast and Furious knockoff, but we think there’s enough Fast and Furious movies lowering SAT scores around the globe, we certainly don’t need any more. And the makers of Speed have been hoping to go back to the classic car movies like Steve McQueen’s Bullitt.
Aaron Paul’s character in Speed is being based on McQueen, and Paul told Entertainment Weekly they couldn’t do a direct adaptation of the video game because “they’re no narrative there. It was a blank canvas. All we need to stick to was super fast cars.”
Like the legendary Bullitt car chase, Paul says they want “the audience to feel like they are in the car with these characters. We use helmet cam shots so you can feel like you’re actually behind the wheel – that’s the one element that we took from the game.”
So we’ll see if Need For Speed can cut it when it comes out on March 14, but it definitely has to go a lot further than a typical Fast and Furious movie to make the grade.
