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Shadow of the Colossus To Become a Movie
Sockatume writes "SCE's critically acclaimed Shadow of the Colossus is set to become a feature film. The cult boss-rush game will be adapted by Justin Marks, who also wrote the recent Chun-Li movie. A friend of the writer reports that the studio hopes to turn it into an LotR-style fantasy blockbuster, expanding upon the side characters in the original game's minimalistic and solitary storyline. This won't be the game's first trip to Hollywood, however. 2007's Reign Over Me featured characters playing the game, at the suggestion of editor Jeremy Roush."
Great game, make a sequel not a movie.
From reading that the game would be a movie to reading who was writing it; that is the biggest smile to terror-frown conversion I've ever had. I think I pulled a muscle...
Demented But Determined.
It was a great game, but there wasn't much of a story. You were trying to save your girl, and to do so you were given the task to slay eight mighty beasts. I don't think there was another person in the whole game.
It had it's ending, which was good, but the game was basically about exploring the world to see how empty it was, then the sudden thrill of the fight with a beast.
It would be nearly unfilmable, without major changes (other characters, stuff in the middle, etc). I guess you could intersperse backstory (the love story part) during the "boring" sequences (searching for the monsters) as first person narration.
But that would change the character. It would no longer be one guy against nothing, realizing that he was killing these giant amazing creatures that usually meant no harm to him. You'd lose the "why am I continuing to do this, it's horrible" part.
Good luck, you're going to need it.
With any luck, this will be cancelled during production. If not, I fear another Mario Brothers movie, only less popular.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I'm a massive SotC fan (I've got a tattoo) but the decision to turn this into a movie is daft beyond belife.
If you had to nail a genre to the game you may as well call it "ambiguous" you could write all the dialogue on a side of paper with room to spare, and character "facts" would fit happily on the back of a postage stamp.
They are basically going to have to write the thing from scratch, no doubt trampling over the games subtleties and treading on many a fan boy toe in the process. For everyone's sake it better look fucking good.
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why would you turn this game into a movie? The chances of this being good are virtually zero. The game was a work of art, and screwing with it is a terrible idea.
Why do they keep making video game movies? Silent Hill has been the only one that was even half-way decent. Why hasn't the public learned to just stay away from these movies?
Seen it.
This seems like the kind of situation where you don't really need to be faithful to the original game, other than the very basic premise (walking around on huge giants). It has potential, and if they do it right, it can be gold.
Of course, there have been many failures at movies that only shared the original premise with the games (like Wing Commander).
next up: full orchestral performance based off of 4:33
The game is essentially about a boy and his horse, and the insurmountable challenges they face together. Think about that Viggo Mortensen film Hidalgo, but place it in a more lush, green world, and a whole lot less talking.
This really has me worried, I loved Shadow of the Colossus, the game was great because every boss was a whole level in itself. Whether you were climbing them or riding them or whatever, it was awesome. I don't know how a movie could capture this.
The game does not fit into the Lord of the Rings style blockbuster. It has just a few, quiet characters, a mysterious central castle, and lots of worlds to explore with just your horse. About the only thing that's similar is you could film SotC in New Zealand like LotR and there's bows and arrows.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The cult boss-rush game will be adapted by Justin Marks, who also wrote the recent Chun-Li movie.
You mean the movie which has a metacritic score of 17% (tied for 89th on their bottom 100) and a rotten tomatoes score of 4%? The only way we'll ever see a proper screen adaptation of a video game is if we stop hiring talentless hacks to write the scripts.
I came here for a good argument
Why don't they just make this movie but base it on Atreyu in Neverending Story? Similar archetype, more story to screw with, they wouldn't have to defile a standalone work of playable art... where's the downside? Just switch gears while you've got the chance, hollywood. I'd be 75% less disgruntled with a Neverending Story 5 or whatever.
I found the game to be beautiful, visually stunning, but tedious and boring. Wandering around vast landscapes to find some hidden monster was an exercise is just pushing the directional buttons and watching the CGI landscape move by in order to fight a series of boss battles.
I hope the movie makers do something better than creating a visually stunning but ultimately boring film to watch CGI landscapes.
Are you suggesting that the movie from a cult classic japanese game should be made by some american that just this year created one of the worst video game based movies?
Come on!, This shouldnâ(TM)t even have passed as a joke.
When is a video game going to make a successful transformation into a blockbuster movie? From what I've seen over the years (Wing Commander, Doom, etc.), the worst comic books still make better movies than the best video games. Maybe they should go back to simpler times and make a movie with some imagination. How about Zork The Movie? They could get Ron Perlman to play a grue.
Geek Of The Day, "A geeky place for geeky faces."
But where's Uwe Boll?
...than another game, precisely because there's no pre-existing story. There's nothing to ruin, nothing to get wrong, no part of my (recent) childhood to rape. They can only EXPAND the story, and there's really not a lot that they can get wrong.
On the other hand, take a game with an amazing, wonderfully thought-out story like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or even the Half-Life series, and a movie would just _ruin_ it. You couldn't tell the same intricate stories in an hour and a half. You'd be stepping on the toes of the pre-existing canon. You'd end up with a story much worse, much sloppier, and more kiddie/general-audience than the one from the game.
The fact of the matter is that Games can be their own story-telling medium, and they have just as much 'artistic' validity as a book and just as much visual appeal as a movie.
If they're going to make a movie from a video game, let it be from one whose story they won't ruin.
To a degree, I can sort of fathom the (mostly monetary) motivations that push producers to convert games into movies or movies into games. And to be fair, there are some movies that feel like video games (300, anyone?), and some video games that feel like films, so the conversion makes a sort of sense in terms of strict cost/benefit analysis.
But Shadow of the Colossus? Really?
This is a game that had only moderate popularity at release. More to the point, though, the substance of its art depended on the gameplay and on an interactive engagement with the constructed environment. As others here have pointed out, there wasn't much in the way of story or character to latch onto. *Minor spoiler alert* I mean, the most moving moment in the story is when the horse plunges into that crevasse. Even then, the effectiveness of that moment as a plot device depended a lot on the use of the horse throughout the game. As a film, what do you have? A guy on a screen (they'll have to give him a name), riding around on a horse, fighting monsters. I'm sure a lot will be invested in special effects. I'm just as sure that the investment will add precisely nothing to the artistic value of the game, which is untranslatable into a static and much less interactive medium.
I wonder if he'll be tapped to do a World of Goo movie next...
As if! At best it will look like Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons, they just need to be sure to hire poor Jeremy Irons to play one of the characters.
EXT DAY WANDER: ARGO! (repeat throughout movie) The End