While not necessarily earth-shaking news for many film goers and gamers, the recent rash of movies based upon video games have been rather disappointing, to say the least. Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve, seems to agree with this, and is disgusted with this trend emanating from Hollywood. In some rather candid comments made to Eurogamer, Newell spanked the film industry for producing such sub-standard movies.
Several film movie scripts have landed on his desk for a possible Half-Life movie, but he commented that, "They all sucked. They’re just bad movies – movies that shouldn’t get made… really uninspired scripts. It’s just not going to happen until we think that there’s a director and a cast and a script and can say this is a movie we’d like to go and see, and not just some vanity piece. We’ve seen what happens to those sorts of movies and the world would be a better place if nine tenths of those projects had never happened."
Uwe Boll, do we have your attention? But we digress.
Newell continued to drive the point home about not compromising their game franchise just for the sake of seeing their game on the silver screen. "I’m a huge fan of movies, I love going to movies and [Valve has] absolutely no reason to [make one]. It’s not like they’ve offered us these giant buckets of cash and said ‘let us go and ruin your game., They offer you little tiny amounts of cash, so it’s like they’ve not even tried to bribe us to go and make a bad movie… Unless it’s a great movie, unless it’s as exciting a movie as the game was a game then it will never get made."
If Hollywood ever produces a blockbuster hit based upon a video game, the overall quality of these types of films is sure to increase in quality, but until then, movie goers and gamers will have to bite the bullet and wait it out until such a movie appears.
