We’ve written a lot about the possible synergy between movies and games, and for a long time it seemed the two worlds would never meet.
This seems somewhat odd, and definitely frustrating, because there’s obviously huge potential there. Think about it – games have big built in audiences where the game sales could drive the box office and vice versa.
That said, games are getting more expensive than ever, with Halo 4 reportedly costing over $100 million, and a big game movie wouldn’t come cheap either. Yet it seems that we may be getting closer to a game changing video game movie, especially with the trailer for Halo 4 produced by David Fincher, and mainstream Hollywood still keeps trying to bring games to the big screen to this day.
One game movie that’s been popping up a bit in the news is Mass Effect, which has been in the works for a while now. As Collider tells us, Mark Protosevich, who wrote the screenplay for I Am Legend, is also penning the script for Legendary, the same company that produced the Christopher Nolan Batman films. As confirmed by ScreenRant, the company was working closely with the game developers, BioWare, to make sure the project turned out right. Cinema Blend also notes that a movie version of Mass Effect has been in the works since 2008.
Now Variety is reporting that an assistant editor named Morgan Davis Foehl is going to try an all new Mass Effect script. While Foehl has worked as an assistant editor in television, he hasn’t yet managed to sell a script. Nevertheless, one of Foehl’s works did make The Black List, Hollywood’s round up of best unproduced scripts.
Foehl is also a big fan of the game, and there’s apparently a lot of big gamers in Hollywood. As noted above, David Fincher produced the Halo 4 trailer because he’s a big fan of the game, while Peter Jackson’s gamer credentials are also very well known.
One of the biggest problems with games being adapted into movies is you not only have hours and hours to get intimate with a game at home, but you also control where the first person shooter is going.
“[We] find the notion of player ownership to be a serious problem with adapting any modern video game,” Collider opined. “Adapt something like Mass Effect, and you have a bunch of frustrated gamers who feel like their controller has been taken away.”
As tough as it may seem to tackle, many screenwriters and directors love challenges, and Hollywood’s still willing to try and lick the inherent problems of a Mass Effect adaptation – in an effort to bring it to the silver screen some day.
