Fear Effect, Hunter The Reckoning Movies Optioned

Thanks to GameGossip for pointing to a Hollywood Reporter article revealing that German uber-producer Uwe Boll has optioned the rights to movies based on Fear Effect and Hunter: The Reckoning. Boll, who had previously claimed his planned Dungeon Siege film had "major crossover potential because of its unique blend of action and fantasy, on the order of Lord of the Rings", and is behind the House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark movies, says Hunter: The Reckoning (originally from the White Wolf pen-and-paper RPG) will be a "hard, brutal, fast-paced ensemble film in the tradition of 'X-Men.'" Hunter will "shoot this summer in downtown Vancouver", with budgets for the 2 movies "ranging from $15 million-$25 million", but it's not known why Eidos' Fear Effect was optioned.

Comments

Suck is an understatement

[Chemical Serenity]

Movie is to suck

as

House of the Dead is to gaping inescapable gravitic black hole event horizion ultra doom deathsuction.

Although I might be understating the situation somewhat.

Re:Please, sweet God, NOOOO

[Corfitz]

Game-based movies are not necessarily bad. The problem is when movie producers stick too firmly to the game instead of just using the world, the general mood and/or possibly the heroes/villains. Sometimes they are forgetting that a movie does not necessarily turn out a big hit just because the game is a hit - they need professional writers to work on the plot, the script and the dialogue to make a good movie.

I could imagine some quite decent movies from, say, the White Wolf line of RPGs, but I do agree that some games might be difficult if not impossible to convert: I for one hope we'll never see a Duke Nukem movie.

Zombies gone Wild!

[August_zero]

15-25 mil is pretty cheap for a film, really.

All you need to do, is cast an attractive young European actress, get her to flash some mammary and you will turn a profit when all is said and done. Do these films ever make the top 10? No. But they don't need to, they just need a modest run in theaters and then a modest batch of sales in the video and DVD markets and profit is yours.

Think of all the terrible slasher films of the 70s and beyond. Why do they still get made? Because they make a lot of money when you look at the big picture.

Re:Zombies gone Wild!

[Golias]

Ture, but in the days of the old "B" pictures, some film-makers took the opportunity to make a guaranteed-success movie and used it to make a good work of art. Hollywood never cared much what the content of a B picture was, as long as had a thrilling title and came in under budget. Sometimes the result was garbage like the films lompooned on MST3k, but every once in a while, a director would realize: "Hey, I'm getting the chance to make a movie here. That's something 99% of the people who want to make movies never get. I should take full advantage of the opportunity." Whenever that happened, we got movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

I wish that the "under-$20 Million" wide distribution industry had more people that understand that. If they did, we would get a lot more flawed-yet-fun direct to video movies like "The Cube" and a lot fewer pieces of crap like "Resident Evil."

Re:Screw Hunter

[dswensen]

If they want to adapt something from White Wolf, why not make a script based on Vampire: The Masquerade?

They already did, it was called Underworld. No, not precisely based off White Wolf's game, but enough so that WW filed a lawsuit. And the actors all look and behave like bad LARPers, so really, I think it works.