Films and Games as Half-Brothers

The movie and game industries have a lot in common nowadays. Both have the majority of their costs up-front in the form of production, with no payback until the finished product is released. Both appeal to a similar target age group. Both rely on surefire "tent-pole" hits to fund their inevitable slip-up titles. Both are becoming increasingly dominated by a few large production firms. Some of these firms are even the same, as is the case with media powerhouse Sony. Brookey, in his article, points out these similarities, among others, as evidence that the game and film industries can easily relate to and understand each other, promoting a partnership between the two media that ties the two together at a business level, in addition to the increasing stylistic convergence.

Despite this, there is a well-founded stereotype that games based on movies and movies based on games will rarely turn out to be good. There are exceptions, like the Spider-Man 2 or Lord of the Rings video games, and the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, but examples like these are few and far between. Brookey touches on this point in his mention of the ET video game, discussing how the game was rushed through production to be released alongside the film, but doesn't go much further. This is definitely a large part of the issue: companies are so keen on having a tie-in that it's unusual not to - just look at the Dark Knight - and this leads to rushing and a general lack of care in the spin-off's creation. But why does this happen? And why are game-based movies so poorly received, when they're not tied to a video game's release date?

I think this happens because the two industries think themselves to be closer than they actually are, and overlook their differences in adapting cross-media titles. From watching game-based movies and playing movie-based games, it feels like the creators thought simply using characters and scenarios from the source material would instantly make the adaptation as good as the original. A movie is a narrative-based media - adapting a game like Super Mario Bros., with a very simple narrative, into a movie does admittedly require some plot embellishment, but the way it was ultimately executed resulted in an experience that contained none of what made the game appealing. It was as though the creators overlaid a sub-par action movie with Mario characters. Similarly, a game like King Kong for the Nintendo DS placed characters and settings from the Peter Jackson movie and laid them atop a near-unplayable first-person-shooter. What works well in a movie will not necessarily work well in a game, and vice-versa. Thought needs to be put into the details of the adaptation, such as with Spider-Man 2's web-slinging mechanic. Alas, this rarely seems to happen, as neither industry seems to understand the other as well as it thinks it does. This leads to some gross misinterpretations of many titles in either direction, often caused by the application of tropes from film to the concept of a game property, which itself is based on very different video game tropes, and vice-versa.

Have you seen/played any examples of good game/film crossovers? What made them stand out from other such adaptations?