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Ubisoft Launches Movie Studio To Make Movies of Its Games
Variety reports that Ubisoft, the game studio behind Assassin's Creed, the Tom Clancy games and the recent Prince of Persia titles, has launched Ubisoft Motion Pictures for the purpose of turning its game franchises into TV and movie franchises.
"Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was brought to the bigscreen by Jerry Bruckheimer, with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. The 2010 pic grossed about $335 million worldwide. The publisher started expanding its reach in 2007, when it launched Ubisoft Digital Arts, a computer animation studio, which created Avatar's ground-breaking 3D vidgame. A year later, it acquired Montreal-based visual effects house Hybride Technologies."
It seems almost obvious really -- why would anyone trust their game>movie experience to an outside group? Having the game makers and designers working on it can only improve what has been, for quite some time, a really awful form of movie. At the same time though, I'm reminded of the mario bros. movie, which I actually like. There was no way they could translate mario into a sane movie, and It was a bad and obvious choice. I fear we may see much more of this, since the differences between the mediums are so huge. That or all our games will become like movies. But that terrifies me so I refuse to acknowledge it.
That movie called "Ass" from Idiocracy?
Please please don't hire Uwe Boll!
Vidgame? Is that a thing? Or just that "kids today can't be bothered to call something by a name longer than two syllables" way that marketeers rename TV shows and movies...?
When you go to the theater you have to get RFID chipped, and if the scanners lose the internet connection, the movie won't play.
Having the game makers and designers working on it can only improve what has been, for quite some time, a really awful form of movie.
Game development and movie development are different skills, one is long duration interactive entertainment and the other is short duration passive entertainment. You seem to be making a very common mistake, assuming great talent in one area translates to great talent in another area. Whatever comes second, the movie adapted from the game or the game adapted from the movie, is usually inferior because of the budgeting and scheduling. Ie the constraints imposed on the development team and not necessarily the ability of the development team.
Haters gonna hate - AC: Lineage series was pretty decent. I would love to see a AC screen adaptation. PoP, if they can pull it off with a little less campyness, I'd be fine in seeing another go at that.
Not to mention movies made out of video games tend to not fare well anyway.
I hope the CEO of Blizzard reads this news and says: "We're going to create our own movie studio!". Hell, it's about time.
A 'Myst' movie is already in the works. It will not be primarily be based on one of the games, but one of the novels, and its provisory title is "Myst: The Book of Ti’ana". For more information, see mystmovie.com.
How convenient, Ubisoft's largest studio happens to be in a city equipped for major motion picture production, Montreal. A city that can fill in both for European and American cities, with major sound stages and VFX companies.
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As a moviegoer that "sees everything that is not too dumb for words" I avoid movies that have anything to do with videogames because, so far, they universally suck. There's nothing remotely believable about the movies, the are all computer video effects and no real story that makes much of any sense. Everything is simply game-play on the screen, and I don't get to have any fun with it.
Coming in a close second is "movies having anything to do with existent toys", which would mean things like the transformer series. Saw a trailer for the upcoming transformers movie last night. Nope, gonna miss that one, too.
Wanna sell me a movie ticket? Tell me a story, preferably with MOVIE STARS in it, not some bozo I've never heard of before that, incidentally, doesn't know squat about acting. Last night's movie for me was Fast Five. At least we have a star or 2, and some fun car chases. Yeah, its terminally stupid, too, but at least fun to look at.
Best movie in the theater at the moment? The Conspirator. Now, THAT tells a story. Water for Elephants, 2nd best, and ditto, tells a story.
Surprisingly, the comic book series have proved very entertaining, although any new movie having anything to do with anything from DC comics is getting a pass as long as the writers think that Superman should somehow be ashamed of being a US citizen, and wishes to renounce that citizenship. They can all go pound sand...
Because you'll have to have an internet connect to watch it, else if you get disconnected or your internet hiccups, it'll send you back to the main menu.
DRM can do the darnest things...
...the cut scene frenzy and extreme linearity of playing Assassin's Creed makes it very much like watching a movie, so it makes sense they may just as well make them full-fledged ones. Not much point in interacting anyway, when all you're doing is helping to drive a plot forward.
and I thought the matrix was bad...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
... what could go wrong?
can be blamed entirely on the studios not hiring talent (directors) who share the passion that video game enthusiasts have. I heard from the writer of the first Tomb Raider movie that the director Simon West stated on set that he, "hates video games and doesn't understand why people play them." And then people wonder why the movie sucked so badly. I hope Ubisoft does a great job with their studio. Too many great video games with really great plots have been destroyed by terrible movies.
Hopefully this is the nail in the coffin of the film franchise rapist Uwe Boll.
Can't wait to see which eyeball-injected DRM solution they require to watch their movies, though! Always-on 3G internet connection by rectal probe?
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Will they require a constant internet connection to watch their movies? And will you have to restart watching from the beginning if your connection drops?
Mada mada dane.
There are few things what I would wish for every PC game developer would include
1] Co-Op and not just deatchmatch or capture the flag
2] Video recording by game engine
The 2] means that the game can be recorded by game engine so even if you play few hours, you get recording what is size of few tens of megabytes and not gigabytes.
And later after recording, player could share the recording to anyone else if wanted. Or edit it (and then share) and even export it to wanted format.
And it should not be just so easy that recording is what is on the screen when player plays, but in editing player gets full controls to the camera as it would be a real camera. Player can choose a zoom (FOV), location and depth of field.
Like observer in many FPS multiplayer games where you are a ghost and you can go around everything.
And then player could easily add/remove record points and go back and worth of the recording. And when player is finished, the recording can be saved and shared to other game owners or then exported as Full HD video in few formats and containers (AVI, MKV, MP4). And player could get fine edited video from the gameplay, were it from multiplayer or from single player.
The game developers have now many times done great cinematic parts for the story, like in Mafia, Mafia II, Mass Effect (+ II) etc. And if player could just on those parts as well move "observer camera" freely and choose different directions to be saved and exported, then players could do awesome own videos.
How can they hope to live up to the masters of the genre, like the great Uwe Boll?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
...from Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros, Alone in the Dark... well, ok so these are particularly atrocious examples but with the exception of Prince of Persia (which i quite liked, but mostly due to Jake Gyllenhaal) all other VG based movies have been mediocre at best. Question: have any game-based movie made any money? (really, have they?)
Load an existing script from the same genre into a word processor (or just use an Alien script)
Search and replace character names
Refine a bit
Film the movie
Wonder why it failed
I'd hardly call Avatar: The Game groundbreaking in any sense of the word.
Wow, this is the first I've seen the Avatar games described as "ground-breaking".
They are aweful, scoring from 50 to 60 on metacritic. We're talking about a real revolution there!
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
If Uwe Boll is blackballed from the process before it even begins, I shall take this as a good sign.
I think it would be quite amazing to see the Assassin's Creed games turned into a movie series. The game is already in and of itself movie quality and pulls you in. If they can do this with games, just think of the possibilities of porting the game to a movie. Not to mention the Las Vegas 2 ... that would make a great movie, too!
Now there will finally be a Heroes of Might and Magic movie! Being turn -based, they might have to chop it up into a trilogy though. Can't wait to see Sandro on the big screen :)
As long as they make a movie about Raving Rabbids.
Those little bunnies are hilarious!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The original, not the movie tie in, and it's got an extensive plot and characterizations that play out as you play through the game. I guess you might mean the original game, but the movie isn't based off the original game...
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...better be Raving Rabbids!
*large square on screen after the credits* - *hold phone up and push button* - Your friend asks, "What was that for?" - You reply, "All Ubisoft movies let you access downloadable content not seen in the film for $5." - "What did you get?" - *looking at phone*, "A plot."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
If you're looking to make bad video game movies, there's only one man for the job.
That instead of being positive about this, all I can think about is how this group will inevitably be shut down? It doesn't seem like this would be somewhere I would want to work if job security was important to me.
What could go wrong.....?
I can't wait to see what they can do with Chessmaster!
Of course there are going to be bad video game movies. There's enough bad normal movies to provide an expectable base % of required good movies to make a genre worthwhile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games#International
You can see that there are a good selection of bad movies in there, but there are a few that scored surprisingly high on rotten tomatoes despite being a very narrow genre, where I'd consider anything with close to 30% or above to have a 'critical acclaim' mark if it was a more mainstream movie.
There are also some that I, being a geek, outright disagree with (Hitman 14%, Max Payne 16%, Doom 19%) which while never going to win an Oscar are far more enjoyable for some easy watching that many of the dire movies that are not videogame related. How did The Transporter manage to get 53% on rotten tomatoes, while Hitman only 14%? How different are the 2 movies? It would seem that being made from a videogame has somehow immediately made these movies score a lot less that other similar calibre movies.