40 responses so far ↓

• Ramses // Feb 12, 2007 at 9:38 pm

  -they dont seem faitful to their source matereals.
  -poor direction
  -even poorer writing
  -with poor direction and writing comes even wrost acting.
  -Rush Jobs
  -no real scope of the matereal eather. They seem to take too many librities with the origenal sources.
  -massive in battles between studeos and the game companies.
  -the producers of the games having NO voice what-so-ever in the production prossess

  and the list goes on and on…I can talk about why untill I go blue in the face.

• Jenny // Feb 12, 2007 at 9:46 pm

  I think a lot of video game movie writers forget that playing a game and watching a movie are two different things. It often feels like people who make video game movies give the game itself no more than a passing glance, and then whoosh, let’s go try to get ourselves an Oscar for special effects! and never stop to think “Um, this was a great game, but is it going to make a great -movie-?” When you’re playing a game, you’re actively involved with it and you are plowing through the story. It’s an immersive experience. When you’re watching a movie everything is being fed to you. Like with Silent Hill, which worked because the player was all alone in an extremely creepy environment, and in a way it was really THEM, in Silent Hill, fighting horrible zombie nurses. But in the Silent Hill movie, the writers seemed to think “Oh let’s just show a lot of creepy monsters, throw in a Pyramid Head for no real reason (stuffing in as many game references as possible seems to be another problem), and use up the rest of our budget on simulated gore for the last big scene.” The movie utterly failed at scaring or entertaining me at all, but the games still keep me up at night, huddling under my blankets like a baby.

  With Castlevania, the stuff besides gameplay that has interested me in some of the newer titles (like Symphony of the Night) is the story (even a little from Dracula’s perspective) and strong art direction, and I really hope the movie can get some of that in there. I’m just assuming from the AWESOME James Jean art that the movie is going to involve CV3, which would be cool. There’s a lot of stuff to work with in that one.

• LBD "Nytetrayn" // Feb 12, 2007 at 11:44 pm

  It varies. I’ve actually found many enjoyable, but a lot of it boils down to what can be done with the source material.

  Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, I thoroughly enjoy. I see them both as somewhat alternate takes, parallel universes if you will.

  In the case of Mario, the original concept will not translate well to live-action. Traditional or computer animation, absolutely, but once you start casting real actors to appear on screen, it’s gone.

  A lot of people compare the original version to some sort of drug trip. I say the movie is like the original without the drugs.

  In the case of Street Fighter, it was a definite attempt to appeal to an American crowd, and one with scarce knowledge and no internet to get the “real” facts from. With that in mind, from the game alone, the movie does pretty well. I think the follow-up cartoon makes it even better, as it turns the movie into something of a prequel to the SFII video game.

  Mortal Kombat was excellent. I don’t know what went wrong with Annihilation. As a casual Tomb Raider fan, I enjoyed the first movie, but never saw the second.

  And when it was shown on USA, I caught the very end of Double Dragon before WWE Raw came on years ago. I heard them refer to a hatchback as the “Dragon Wagon,” and have steered clear of it. I need to watch it someday just to see how bad it is.

  But as noted, a lot of it boils down to understanding the franchise, and seeing how it works best in movie form.

  A lot of people will look at an old game like Super Mario Bros. or Castlevania, say “there’s no story,” and just do their own thing. It just doesn’t work like that.

  The best way to approach it is to look at the basic story as a springboard, such as I’ve seen in TV show bibles, and expand on the concepts within. Fill in the blanks. Bring the universe to life how it should be, not the way you think might be cool, just because you think it’s cool.

  –LBD “Nytetrayn”

• PoisonMushroom.Org - Combing the Net So You Don’t Have To » Blog Archive » Points of Interest - 2/13/07 // Feb 13, 2007 at 1:39 am

  […] on the Castlevania: Dracula’s Curse movie blog, they ask the question of “why have movies based on video games been so […]

• Christopher // Feb 13, 2007 at 5:29 am

  The exposition… in very few exceptions, most early generation console game, you have a silent protagonist, very little set up and BAM! drop you into the middle of the undead action. I guess I’m thinking specifically of Castlevania here. I have to say I’m a little envious of Warren’s job here as I’ve wanted to see an adaptation for some time. Though I do NOT envy the job of satisfying testy fanboys.
  The thing that always struck me with this series was the challenge of the task before the Belmonts. One man versus an army of the undead but also their dogged relentlessness; pushing through the twisted landscape, to the heart of Dracula’s empire. Plus, the Japanese have always seem to have an interesting interpretation on all things gothic.
  Tap into your inner vampire slayer Warren, we BELIEVE in you! Just remember what Nietzsche said about monsters.

• Victor // Feb 13, 2007 at 5:38 am

  I’d have to say that it’s partially because it’s not entirely faithful to it’s source material. But that problem doesn’t exactly stop at video game adaptations. Often, comic ones suffer from this as well. Shit, the only video game I couldn’t possibly imagine suffering from this as a movie is MGS. Simply because the game itself is such a borderline to watching a movie. Play for 30minutes and get rewarded with 30minutes of cut scenes. Unfortunately with a side scroller, often the storyline is quite simple and you don’t have a lot to go on. But with the castlevania series having such a long run you can compensate for this by looking over the time line and having some back story. You know… death, slogra and gaibon fit in almost every time line. That’d be an interesting thing to develop on. Anyways, I’m sure you’ll get a decent amount of feedback here.

• Peter // Feb 13, 2007 at 5:52 am

  Granted, most video game inspired movies produced in the past have been bad. However, if you look at the movies themselves apart from the game they can be really enjoyable. Super Mario Bros., for example, is a perfectly fun B action comedy. I remember loving it when I was a kid. The goombas were my favorite part of the movie. Die hard Mario Brothers fans would probably kick me right now but I think it’s ok to take some liberties when making the transition to film as long as you acknowledge that you’re not making a true interpretation. It may not be totally true to the Mario Brothers games but it was still a fun movie.

  And the Mortal Kombat movie? It was awful! Without it though, we would have never had the chance to hear The Immortals album, ‘Mortal Kombat’, a tribute techno album based on the movie based on the game. This musical gem featured tracks about each of the primary characters from the game. Lyrical mastery did follow;

  “Sub Zero,
  Chinese Ninja warrior,
  With your heart so cold!
  Sub Zero, whoah!
  Your life is a mystery,
  Because you wear a mask!
  Sub Zero, whoah!”

  If a game-movie adaptation turns sour you can still find something enjoyable in it or nearby.

• Peter // Feb 13, 2007 at 7:25 am

  It’s also a tragedy that Raul Julia’s last film before his death was Street Fighter. I think they even had a “in memory of” credit at the end.

• Patrick // Feb 13, 2007 at 10:28 am

  I think the Silent Hill movie managed to retain the same feel as the game. The game movies that failed the worst in my opinion were the ones that didn’t even get the visuals right. Doom stands out as a series with a very simple, formulated look that has been with the series since the start. When they made the movie, it was like they tried everything to completely avoid the appearance of the game. Instead of making it an action movie it became a suspense movie. And the story should have been: Gateway to hell opens on Mars > Marines come in > Fight off army of demons > Kill Satan.

  I think film studios put a lot of restrictions on writers to make sure their scripts are more accessible to the public, but then end up over explaining things and the backstory boggs down the story progression. Needless and shallow complexity is what destroys Hollywood movies.

  I think with Castlevania you should avoid the “Let me tell you some things about Dracula” opening that is at the beginning of every vampire movie. Make it just like the game: Belmont comes out of the forest > whips some wolves > goes into the castle > opening credits.

• Brandon Cook // Feb 13, 2007 at 2:25 pm

  The same reason why comic book adaptations have almost universally been sub-par: they try to unsuccessfully reinvent because they underestimate the quality of the source material.

• Brendan // Feb 13, 2007 at 3:25 pm

  The main reason movies based on games have been so bad is because the movie studios underestimate the intelligence of the gamer demographic. They assume gamers will like any overdone special effects extravaganza as long as it has some game license arbitrarily slapped on it. Sure, I’ll admit that I like explosions and fight scenes as much as the next guy, but only if the plot concerning those scenes is worth a damn. I agree with critic Roger Ebert that action scenes are only good when you care about the characters involved.

  My advice to production51 is to remember that videogames and movies are two very different mediums. What works in a game might not translate well in a movie. Don’t be afraid to take liberties with the story, as long as it is good fans will forgive you for making changes. Most of all avoid the downfall of many other videogame adaptions and give characters actual realistic dialogue. Too many times in these movies characters end up explaining all the complicated backstory rather than speaking to each other.

  One thing I must commend you for is the choice of doing it animated, opposed to W. S. Anderson’s ill-fated live action version. The reason for this is becuase Castlevania’s artwork (especially Ayami Kojima’s) has always had an air of romanticism. It does not look “almost real,” because it isn’t trying to be real. It exists in some highly-romanticized world that only exists in books and paintings. Animation is the only way that could be portrayed on the silver screen. Then again I wouldn’t expect the director of Alien vs. Predator to understand something like that. I hope what I’ve said can be of some help to you guys.

• Guy // Feb 13, 2007 at 5:12 pm

  I think going with Castlevania III was a step in the right direction. It’s kind of pointless to make movies out of today’s games because they’re already so cinematic. With an NES game, you have plenty of room to do with the story what you will. As long as you stay true to the core of the story and don’t end up making something completely different (which was the Super Mario Bros. movie’s biggest flaw) you have a good shot.

  You’ve got James Jean and Warren Ellis involved, too, so that’s a plus. Even though this is a direct to DVD release, I’m looking forward to this much more that Paul W. S. Anderson’s movie. His poster just completely ruined whatever expectations I had. “Dracula Begins” makes it sound like another Van Helsing movie.

• Chelsea // Feb 13, 2007 at 5:21 pm

  And because they didn’t have James Jean on the team. DUH.

• Garou // Feb 14, 2007 at 4:45 am

  The reasons are so simple, that it would be very easy if the right people do the job.

  My favourite example is the Resident Evil Movie;

  The whole production design didn’t refer to the games.

  The interesting story about secret human experiments wich involved the government was completely scrapped.

  A C-Movie director who didn’t just make the movie but also wrote the script (if we could call it so).

  A producer who prefered the C-Movie director over the first choice for this film: the one and ONLY George A. Romero!

  Bad actors who played empty and lieveless roles.

  A new plot with less gore (so many younger peolpe could pay their money for the screenings), less political statements, a stupid industrial soundtrack instead of the scary classic themes of the games, liveless protagonists and locations, and tons of stupid errors and plotholes.

  The movie was forced to be cool, stupid and empty so the “stupid” gamers would pay for this mess!

  And it’s not only RE, we could take every game-movie and change the title, it would be the same!

  I hope (and think) that Castlevania Draculas Curse will be the first film wich pays justice to it’s original!

• Danial // Feb 14, 2007 at 10:57 am

  Making any kind of adaptation is walking a thin wire. On the one hand, you want to win over new fans and make money while hopefully staying true to the spirit of the original product. On the other hand, you want to keep the established fanbase without telling the exact same story as the original.

  I think that’s where most video game movies fail. They take some ideas of the original game and create their own story, which is fine, but usually what made the game unique and interesting is lost in the translation. Some fault is also on the fans too. They expect to watch the exact thing they played. But what’s the use of retelling a story exactly the way everyone knows it? If I wanted that, I could just play the game again. So some liberty has to be taken.

  I do think one of the big questions to consider in making Dracula’s Curse is; Do you want this to be in continuety with the games? I don’t know if that’ s an important subject to the various creators or Project 51, but it probably will be to the fans. Evan though the original storyline for the game is somewhat vague, there is still enough information to be considered. And not just from the American side, but also the Japanese side of the story, since most of the translations were poor at best and left out various details.

• Zaratustra // Feb 14, 2007 at 6:19 pm

  Bad writers.

• Matt // Feb 14, 2007 at 9:23 pm

  hmm, I must agree, trying to “introduce the story” in what is essentially a series is unneccessary, and that people don’t stick to the existing provided story.

  instead of becoming Dracula’s curse the movie, it becomes an interpretation of Dracula’s curse turned into a movie. All the aforementioned had their own unique charm about them, and were entertaining to watch, but MOST equally sucked at faithfully sticking to their story. Even resident evil did change things a bit., although of all the ones mentioned the resident evil series stuck to it’s story far more than most, and ended up pretty good as a result.

  Lastly, everyone’s a critic, someone always hates the movie, and someone always loves it. Just the way it is.

  Now if only they could do legacy of kain/soul reaver, that would be interesting, or half life…everyone is waiting for that

• Guy // Feb 15, 2007 at 9:57 pm

  Somebody needs to do a movie adaptation of the original NES Ninja Gaiden and let the Minibosses do the soundtrack.

• Ben Brooks // Feb 16, 2007 at 8:56 pm

  I think most game movies (or movies in general) are bad because people don’t like thinking laterally. They see Silent Hill = Slasher Flick and so on. Castlevania would be a horrible action or generic horror movie. But that would be what most people would try to do with it. Especially since there’s not really alot to go on with the story.

  I’m working on some pics to submit and hopefully finally get a decent art job, even if it is a small thing. While I was working on them the other night I put in Howl’s Moving Castle. And it hit me how perfect that movie both in art style and story telling would be for a Castlevania movie. A sense of wonder at the really messed up castle of Dracula and the surrounding world and a certain humor that the series developed starting with Symphony.

  If you really wanted to go the horror route I’d suggest the Magnetic Rose section from Katuhiro Otomo’s Memories for inspiration. A cast of characters from different backgrounds and a unique psychological and physical challenge for each of them in a highly improbable, lonely, and ornate setting. Combined with an overall feeling of unease and loss as well as the underlying malevolence of the forces at work in the castle.

  It’s probably wishful thinking that the project would go in such directions. I think it would be a real coup for American animation (as much as that still exists) to tackle a movie, much less a video game movie, with real sophistication and not rely on the standard beats and cliche’s. To me avoiding those things and making something new and interesting (emphasis on interesting of course) is the mark of sucess rather than how faithfully you’ve adapted from the original source material.

  Otherwise why not just have gameplay footage with voice overs?

• JonSnow // Feb 17, 2007 at 8:37 am

  The most part of these movies is low budget, but there are a lot of other reasons for low quality of game-based movies.

  Firstly, the real atmosphere of original game is often loosed. It is not enough to use perfect customes or faithful background for conveying the feel witch a real fan expects. The director has to be able to recreate the game-feeling by -ALL- ways. The dialogue usually have not much citations, for examples.

  The storyline is overly detached from original plot because there is a clear distinction between an artistic work thought for a passive observer and another more active product. Also the time of seasons is different: in a pair of hours a movie director has less possibilities to describe the characters and their lives…

  Moreover the quality strongly depended from the game itself. I don’t beleave the games such as “Super Mario Bros.” or “Tomb Raider” lend themself for a cinematographic transposition.

• Nadia // Feb 18, 2007 at 7:59 am

  I wrote a Feature for 1UP on the same topic a while back. I think a lot of the problem lies in the fact game stories are never taken very seriously.

• Mark B // Feb 21, 2007 at 8:37 am

  The problem is that they underestimate the audience. Much like how old people still think that comic books are for kids, these directors think that the crowd playing video games must be younger, so things need to be done to appeal to those crowds.

  Gamers are picky people, just like readers. If you change the source material on any subject, somebody will get pissed. Now thats alright, assuming you don’t change it entirely (see: Silent Hill). Making a male a female, destroying any coherent plot that existed, these would be bad choices. For further understanding on this topic, see Final Fantasy: Spirits Within.

  You need to make it mature, and dark like the game itself. When playing Castlevania (the ones worth mentioning at least) there isn’t any comic relief. There would be absolutely no reason to introduce this kind of thing into the movie. This also stands for one-liners, something that seems common in these game movies (once again, underestimating the crowd).
  Kind of just tagging this on the end, but its really necessary to keep the art style similar to the souce material. This kind of goes hand in hand with not making an action adventure game into a action/adventure/comedy movie. Important point restated for the third time: don’t underestimate your audience.

• Mark M. Smith // Feb 22, 2007 at 2:14 am

  Well, let’s look at this by looking at the films you’ve referenced:

  Double Dragon, House of the Dead, and Super Mario Bros. never had enough plot to work as a film. The games are about the experience of playing them and aren’t really trying to tell a story. What plot there is exists only to provide context for the action (and in both Mario and Double Dragon it’s merely “rescue the girl”). The games would have played just about the same if in Mario my goal was to reclaim my prized wrench or if Double Dragon was my quest to become the new boss of the city’s street gangs. Without a plot to build off of there really isn’t any point in trying to move it into a new medium. It would be like making Bungie Jump: The Movie!

  Street Fighter, though I am not familiar with it, apparently has a good enough backstory to supply a moderate action film. A friend of mine writes terrible fan-fic so there’s got to be something there worth exploring. The movie, though, played very fast and loose with the backstory of the games and game up with merely a low-budget, uninteresting over-the-top (gotta be ‘cuz it’s a video game!) action movie.

  Doom I didn’t see, but again I can see how the basic premise (teleportation accidentally creates a gateway to hell, space marines shoot demons) is enough to create a decent action movie. Sure it’d probably end up being a bit of an Aliens rip-off, but that’s what you’ve got. I blame this for sucking for the same reason licensed video games often suffer: they assume that the license is, in fact, a license to print money without having to do any actual, original work. So we get a shoddy, uninteresting action movie just like many, many others that come out every year.

  Tomb Raider (though I detest Angelina Jolie and felt she was terribly miscast) was basically a rip-off of Indiana Jones with a female lead and, if done competently could have been enjoyable. Again, I didn’t see it, but it looked horrible. The premise, however, was one that has provably worked in the past, all it requires is good writing and directing. Something many video game movies (and, of course, many adaptions of all kinds that are unsucessful) don’t have.

  Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark had potential. They were based on what are basically adventure games. Resident Evil, the game, even tried to ape many horror movie conventions at various times to good effect. Instead the writers threw out most of the source material and wrote a generic movie with a few passing mentions of things in the game. They toned and dumbed it down and assumed that they needed to make it work for a mass audience when they were really just making it work for pretty much nobody. In both of these games one of the most critical elements was tension. Unlike games, where the tension and apprehension can often come from the player moving into someplace unfamiliar, in films, due to their passive nature, the tension often must come from the viewer’s lack of control. Instead of “I don’t know what’s beyond this door and that makes me scared” it’s often that “I know what’s beyond that door and I’m afraid because I know I can’t do anything about it”. But this is all very basic to the making of any good suspense/horror film. Also add in a big dose of just good ‘ol shoddy filmmaking.

  Final Fantasy looked great. It really did. The voice acting, while wooden (get real voice actors! Y’know, people who know what they’re doing, not celebrities you’ll never see who instead have famous voices that you assume will put asses into seats) wasn’t so much the problem either. The story was a bit lame and not to my taste, but really this should have worked. Final Fantasy never has any persistent backstory making it both a good (nothing to be tied down to) and a bad (no good reason to make the movie aside from series pedigree and the fact that they’ve all pretty much just become movies with games attached anyway) thing. I can’t explain why it didn’t work. It just didn’t.

  Wing Commander is about the same as Final Fantasy. The games kept becoming increasingly based around their full-motion video cinematics. Yet somehow the movie was awful. Battlestar Galactica (the new series) is what we should have gotten: a drama about the people fighting a war in space. Battlestar Galatica (the cheesier, but beloved original) was a lot more like what we actually got.

  Mortal Kombat was actually kinda fun. It was a martial arts movie with a bunch of cool fight scenes and the thin premise that this is a big tournament. There was a thin reason for each fighter to be there and they carried it out with some good action. The movie firmly represented what the game was about while not actually managing to replicate or say anything about playing the game. The thing is, they appeal to (or at least should) appeal to the same audience of people who think that people doing wicked martial arts moves is cool.

  Now, as long as this is, I think the key to making this not end up in that long list of failure is pretty basic.

  First off respect your source material. Not just actually following the plot, but understanding why the plot works. Why it works as a game and why it would work as the dramatic arc of someone in a film.

  Second, while not mentioned above, don’t just change things for the hell of it. Was there a really good reason why Angelina Jolie wore a black shirt in the Tomb Raider movie rather than a turquoise one? Unless you’ve got a legitimate reason for it, stick with the arbitrary choices already made in the game. Otherwise you just upset the nit-pickers. I mean, seriously, in the new Dresden Files show why did they have to change “The White Council” to “The High Council” it doesn’t affect the show and it just pissed off fans.

  Third, put the time and effort into it. So far it looks like you’ve already done this. You’ve got an excellent and very appropriate artist working on the project. Warren Ellis is an excellent writer and a huge personal favorite (though, I’ll admit, he seems a bit of an odd fit to this project… it’s not his usual sort of subject matter and he’s never shown any interest in the game before). The very fact that you’re asking these questions shows that you’re trying to do it right and puts you above pretty much everything else on the list.

  This movie could work very well. There’s a solid plot in place, the game and it’s copious mythology lend itself well to adaptation, and the film isn’t being made as a quick cash-in. I’d say that as long as you follow the other suggestions mentioned (e.g. keep it a dark, gothic, romanticized film for an adult audience) you won’t have any worries about adding a new entry to this list of shame.

• Scott Speaks // Feb 22, 2007 at 10:22 am

  Because the games are generally lacking in the two key things that make movies good: characterization and plot, and the people making the movies don’t have the ovaries to invent some of those and add them to the mix.

• Jeremiah Blatz // Feb 22, 2007 at 10:38 am

  Why have cars based on rhinoceroses been so bad? After all, they both move around, and they’re both heavy.

  Video games are about interaction, “flow,” overcoming obstacles, etc. Movies are about suspending your disbelief and believing that someone else is overcoming obstacles. The story is a fairly minor aspect of most video games, and as long as it’s aligned with the gameplay, the “audience” can fill out the plot with their own interpretations.

  Since the plot of most video games is so skeletal, and the character development is something that the player experiences or even imagines, games do not translate well to movies. Movies based on very short stories often have the same problem. (I’m especially thinking of “A.I./Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” especially here, though the landscape is littered with such disasters*.) If your entire story fits well in 20 pages, you’re going to have a hard time making a 2-hour film out of it.

  * I guess A.I. is only a disaster if you read the short story first. All the power and pathos of the short story is ground beneath the massive weight of the 1.5 hour postscript they tacked on.

  I think a reasonable area for game licenses to produce films that are good in their own right is the more open-ended games that have not only story, but also flexibility. If you make a World of Warcraft movie, you take the world and make whatever movie you want in it. As long as you make the environment faithful to the gameplay and throw in a smattering of references, you’ll keep the fanbois happy, and as long as you stay away from the central story of the game you can make a proper movie. There’s amature WoW machina there that’s got far better storytelling than almost every professional game movie to date.

  In short, I think game movies are usually doomed because game plots are nothing like movie plots, and because the things that make a particular game great usually have nothing to do with the things that make movies great (Tetris the movie!). If you add to that the difficulties that the movie industry has with doing marketing and positioning for game movies, which other posters have spoken to quite well, it’s pretty clear that game movies are difficult to make well.

• rey // Feb 22, 2007 at 3:15 pm

  BE FAIR, Mortal Kombat the movie was actually better than the game.

  Besides that– My answer would have to be: LACK OF REY.

  Also, a Katamari Damacy movie would be incredible.

• amy // Feb 22, 2007 at 5:46 pm

  I see adaptations of games and comics into movies an elaborate form of fan art. If the maker understands the spirit of what makes the work great, they’ll do a good job. If not, it’s just second-guessing in order to appeal to an audience, resulting in cold work.

  Take Lord of the Rings and Spiderman, both those films feel like they understand what makes those works great and also adhere to the original material’s spirit. If I were adapting something I’d be looking to things like that for examples.

  p.s. I’m really enjoying James’ artwork on this site!

• Ben Brooks // Feb 23, 2007 at 7:10 pm

  “You need to make it mature, and dark like the game itself. When playing Castlevania (the ones worth mentioning at least) there isn’t any comic relief. ”

  That’s not my impressions of the games at all. There are creepy parts (especially the music), and serious parts, and since Symphony some amusing and silly parts. It just needs to be treated with some respect is all.

  Not a necesarily a hard thing to do. But more often than not it’s just people making movies as a job and not really what they enjoy doing is my take. If it’s just a paycheck you tend to half-ass it.

• Samael Howard // Feb 25, 2007 at 10:03 pm

  Video game movies will continue to fail as long as they are movies about video games.

  The visual assets and character designs are not enough to support a movie. These people must breathe. They must dream. They must dare to give a shit about things, and flirt, and be wrong, and be everything we wish we could be, and be just as free to sometimes fail.

  Why are you telling this story?

  Why do these people matter?

  If I’ve never played the game, why do I care?

  Give us a dream…

• Otaku-Man // Mar 7, 2007 at 2:01 pm

  This… this is a good question. While the many people here have already gone over, ad nauseum, the things that make a video game based movie bad; I’ve decided to take a different approach.

  What would make the Castlevania: Dracula’s Curse movie GOOD!

  –Art

  1) Art - The movie HAS to feel gothic and old world European, with creepy Haunted Castle vibe. James Jean on Art Direction, based on the promo art, show that this should definitly be taken care of.

  2) The animation has to be fluid and smooth. It has to be able to show great kinetic and potential energy. Both the quiet moments and the high action ones.

  –Music

  3) The music should be nothing BUT music from the game. This should be easy as Castlevania: Dracula’s Curse had a fantastic soundtrack, far advanced than NES games at the time. Each song in the game had a title to it.

  3a) Some specific scenes MUST have the correct music to go with them.

  Opening Credits: Prelude
  Dracula Battle: Overture
  Ending Credits: Evergreen

  And then some.

  4) The music should NOT be rock. It should have a more ambient and orchestral feel to it to give the proper mood to the movie and movie scenes. The best example I can think of is the way the music was produced for Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness.

  5) GET THE ENEMY NAMES RIGHT! It is CRUCIAL to get the proper Japanese to English translations right. One of the best examples are the Whip-Toting Skeletons. In Japan, they are called “Shimon”, which in Kanji means “Gates of Darkness”, and in Katakana means “Simon”. It’s a pun.

  Whatever you do, do NOT call that thing “The Gates of Darkness” OR “Simon”. Simon Belmont isn’t even born at this point, so he should NOT be mentioned at all.

  At this point, I’d just refer to it as a “Whip-toting Skeleton” or just “Skeleton”.

  6) Opening credit expecations? Something like this:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjn8DpT428

  That’s the kind of music quality I would look for in the movie. Or at least around that if not greater.

  I’ve got a lot more ideas on how to make it good, and just wish I could be an advisor from a fan perspective. I wish.

  ~Otaku-Man

• aldrei // Mar 26, 2007 at 12:37 pm

  make a movie about alucard, his story is a lot more interesting than those belmonts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• bluefunoodle311 // Mar 27, 2007 at 7:36 pm

  Two Words:
  Uwe Boll

• Arlington Cruz // Apr 18, 2007 at 9:22 am

  I believe that the main reason why game movies have been so bad is because usually the directors are not fans and don’t know much about why the subject matter captivates the minds of fans, the world they have created on their heads. Take for instance, street fighter the live action and street fighter 2 the animated movie. The animated movie was more succuessful at developing the world the fans have created.

  Even though a film is made to grab a mass audience; a director must focus on making a good film for the fans first, once there is a story good enough for the fans, then expand on adding to the script forthe non-believer( larger audience and people who don’t know about castlevania).

  Nevertheless, I hope that the creative staff does a great job with the story and read some of the fans suggestions.

• George // Apr 24, 2007 at 9:27 pm

  I think many video game movies fail because they are based on games that are games first. Especially Nintendo games. Mario brothers, for example, is basically a cartoon. It doesn’t really make sense to turn it into a live action movie. Trying to rationalize fantastical elements of a cartoon, such as being able to jump high, by incorporating jumping mechanisms is just utterly ridiculous. An animated movie would have been perfect for mario bros. For Mortal Kombat live action made sense. That was ok, it could have been better but it wasn’t that bad. It just depends. It’s mainly hollywood, laziness and stupidity that makes game movies suck. Castlevania could be live action as well and I would have loved to see that, especially a live action symphony of the night. I have a cool vision of how that could turn out… generally though with animation there more freedom to do what you want. The medium probably could have been taken advantage of better if SotN powers and the such were incorporated into the film. Dracula’s curse seems like a more straight forward medieval sort of movie that Steven spielburg probably could have made.

  I just ask 1 thing of you. Just 1. Please, PLEASE make a scene of Trevor swinging from a chandalier or something with his whip like in Castlevania 4! Possibly to kick a skeleton out of the way :p … That gameplay element should never have left the series!

• George // Apr 24, 2007 at 9:57 pm

  Specifically

  -Don’t lump the film into a genre.
  -Good writing. Elaborate on the mythology behind the franchise. Surprise us, take us into different directions, plot twists. Make me give a shit about the characters. I want to feel the power of a belmont. I want to say, that was f’in awesome, I want to cry. I want to laugh. Maybe there’s a love interest who’s actually a demon? Maybe alucard is kept tormented by his cursed blood? Poor writing of previous game movies have ruined those films.
  -Don’t try to add some fantasmical bullshit. Try to stay true to what little already exists to explain the game’s world and the series’ mythology.
  -A (vampire) killer soundtrack! Metal/goth themes should prevail. How about using real music. Nightwish anyone?

• Richard Hartnell // May 3, 2007 at 10:45 am

  This may be a little late, but I had this conversation *very* frequently when I worked with a bunch of film geeks at a video game retailer.

  We basically boiled it down to three things we could see:

  1. Games are about gameplay - especially games in the 80s. The entire plot of Castlevania 3 is the same as the plot of Castlevania 1, with extra widgets: “Go kill Dracula so he doesn’t eat everybody.” Not exactly a script-seller. In other words, the causality of video games has classically been shit. It’s hard hard hard to extrapolate the plot of “Stomp the bad guys, save the Princess” into a winning film. Let’s even look at Resident Evil - the plot was cool and the story was compelling enough for several sequels, but it’s really a game about walking around looking for oddly-shaped keys. So you need a kickass writer on the project, as well as everyone else whose job it is to say, “No, that’s a terrible idea.”

  2. The problem with the prior point is that these games are often so heavily licensed that you go broke just trying to get the rights to make the damn thing. This means that, for the right to not have to come up with your own film idea, you get to throw a decent chunk of your budget into some corp’s wallet instead of, I don’t know, hiring a decent film editor, composer, or maybe some [voice, in your case] actors to be in the film.

  3. Many of these movies are not the creation of artists - they’re the creation of corps who realize that they will make more money than they spend, no matter how bad it is. This, as always, has a kind of shlock-generating promise to it.

  I don’t know why I didn’t start reading this sooner. I’ve been gaming longer than I’ve been walking, and CV is my favorite series. Feeded.

• Illuminerdi // May 3, 2007 at 10:56 am

  I’d say one of the bigger reasons video games movies fail to work is that they disrespect or try to re/overwrite the mythology of the source material, so they piss off the core fanbase. Combined with bad acting or mischaracterization, they then abuse non-fans of the game with weak writing and no emotional impact, and over reliance on either SFX or action scenes, but they never have the budget to effectively carry the movie with this things alone. Not to mention that even non game movies that try this sort of technique largely fail as well. Throw in art design that usually has little similarity to the source material (the games), and the end result is a product that’s usually linked to its source via character names, or settings. Thus obliterating continuity/canon (something that geeks are obsessed with), while failing to effectively suck us into this “alternate” take on the story. Recent comic book movies have (the good ones) worked because they didn’t mangle the characters or settings too badly, and kept enough of the existential crises that create the emotional impact for the characters that made the comic great. Spider Man worked because Peter Parker had to grapple with the feelings of guilt over the death of his uncle, and his desire to fit in, and have the love of his woman, without putting her in harm’s way while he tries to save the world, and his own best friend hating him and secretly blaming him (unknowingly) for the death of his father. It didn’t take the audiences for granted and just try to show Spider Man beating up the bad guys in super happy ideal world where nobody ever dies, and nothing bad happens to the “good guys”, whose superpowers only bring them happiness and bunnies, and carry no weight, burdens, or responsibility.

  So what of video game movies? Doom got the monster designs right (assuming you didn’t mind the monster designs of Doom 3), but failed to create proper atmosphere, and took too many liberties with what little story there was (superhuman serum? genetic experiments instead of demons from hell? wtf?). Plus, the story they did write was boilerplate stuff with little thought put in, and some awful characterization. Stir in some atrocious acting and camera work, simmer, and voila: Bad Movie Souffle. The first person shooter segment of the movie was a neat idea, but even that got ruined, because they let it go on for too long, and only used it once. And it was a gimmick. You can’t ride an entire movie on a gimmick.

  Tomb Raider had the right idea by trying to paint an alternate adventure of Lara Croft, rather than adapting an existing one, but failed to create that important emotional impact, again with flat, lifeless characterization, and over reliance on action to drive the movie. Overall though, I’d say it worked the best of any game movie I’ve ever seen, simply because it managed to feel much like the game. Woman with huge guns (and pistols at her side, as well), does acrobatic craziness and fights off mystical forces to save the world. The arguable failure here is that this is not exactly the template for a good story. The Tomb Raider games were never about story, being largely hammy and horrible, but the gameplay and puzzles were amazingly fun (the first two times, anyway), allowing the player to ignore the campy stories.

  Castlevania 3 doesn’t have a super complicated story told through cutscenes, so the real challenge faced here is effectively fleshing out what little story there was. Giving Alucard motivation for teaming up with Trevor, or detailing who the Belnades were and how Sypha fits into this and giving her motivation to join up as well. Don’t try to rewrite history where Sypha is Trevor’s girlfriend and started the whole journey with him, or Alucard is his half brother and Dracula was just vampirized (it’s a word, I swear) a few years ago, because of something Trevor did (stole Sypha away from him). The fans will riot if you do this, because we know better. We know that Dracula’s been around for what, 3 or 4 centuries at this point? I can’t remember the exact numbers, but you get the point: we know enough to know that he didn’t turn into a vampire last week. We know the whip is called “The Vampire Killer”, and those of us who slogged through Lament of Innocence know that it contains the soul of the lover of one of the first members of what would become of the Belmont clan. We’re ok with fleshing out the details of these events, but only if done properly. Sure, you can paint Dracula as an egomaniac, but if you make him a campy lunatic, it’ll just piss us off. We don’t want melodramatic caricatures of the dramatis personae, we want realistic, complicated, sympathetic characters that behave like people would (or should) in this situation.

  Another thing game movies seem to do wrong is rely on Deus Ex Machina situations and hidden superpowers, destroying the feel of playing the game: persistent progress. The Resident Evil movie’s main character had superhuman powers and could probably tear zombies limb from limb without needing a gun. She used some batons to take down Nemesis in the second movie. Anyone who’s played RE 2 or 3 knows that Nemesis class creatures usually take (many) grenades or magnum rounds to kill. Meanwhile, in the RE games, the player had limited ammo, and was afraid of even the most basic enemies because death was always just around the corner, but so was just one more clip of ammo. Seeing Nemesis inspired awe and dread, because he could quickly kill you, so you had to throw everything you had at him just to avoid dying. You couldn’t run up and beat him to death.

  And I agree wholeheartedly with the above poster: don’t try to rationalize the game world by explaining why the character can jump high, or why candles drop items. You can make a nod to these things, but just leave it be. The games never explained these things (the closest we got was the Cube of Zoe in Castlevania: SotN, which alludes to the idea that the candles were a mystical process of some kind), so you don’t need to. Other game movies have done this, and it’s another instance of mythology rewriting. Doom tried to do it with the superhuman serum thingy. RE did it with…a superhuman serum thingy. Tomb Raider did it with…a superhuman artifact thingy. These are all cheap Deus Ex Machina devices that are trying to explain things that don’t merit explanation. Seeing the Belmonts fight demons is enough to explain to the audience that this is a mystical world, and the “normal rules” don’t apply. You don’t need to explain their mystical powers, or invent a talisman that gives it to them. It’s just there.

  Wow this post got long.

• Illuminerdi // May 3, 2007 at 11:31 am

  Also, if you’re going to explore the characters and mythology, do it plausibly. Trevor Belmont was born into the Belmont clan, and is fated to fight Dracula. But that doesn’t mean he has to be a superhero, or noble, or upstanding or cookie cutter. He’s told from day one that his destiny is to risk his life for no tangible reward: so what kind of crises could that present to him? Maybe he wants to live a quiet life as a farmer, ala Braveheart, or fears failure and the ruination of the entire world at the hands of Dracula. That’s a hefty burden, after all. But even that’s kind of shallow, too easy to write and too hard for the viewers to relate to. Maybe he meets Dracula early on in the story and doesn’t realize it, and befriends him, or at least sympathizes with him, and later has to wrestle with feelings of betrayal, and/or betraying his friend. That’s much easier for the audience to associate with. Or what if he previously led a series of witchhunts that resulted in the death of innocent people whom he thought to be controlled by, or working for evil, because he was a zealot devoted to the ideal of crushing evil, even perceived. What if this resulted in the death of his girlfriend and/or their child, one or both of whom had mystical powers? Tie this into his meeting Sypha, a woman with mystical powers, and perhaps he sees protecting her as a form of atonement for failing to protect his previous lover. Maybe *that’s* why he was praying to the altar at the beginning of the game, asking for salvation (or even death)? Or what if his guilt over this makes willing (or even wanting) to die at the hands of Dracula?

  Having never spoken a word, we know nothing of his character except that he’s a Belmont, raised to fight evil and brandish his whip, and kill Dracula. What happened to him between years 1 and 20-something are your call, so he doesn’t have to be a stereotypical hero. Maybe he’s even a bit of an antihero? Nobody said the Belmonts had to be perfect, just that they have to fight Dracula (and use a whip). They’re still human, still flawed.

  Alucard is just as robust, though his story is a bit more fleshed out, and the half human half vampire is a bit of a cliched character at this point. But what if this was his first battle with his father, before he’d come to grips with the death of his mother? Maybe this was during the witchhunts led by Trevor (perhaps he’s even unaware of this when they meet…) as that is how his mother died, according to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. So perhaps he seeks his father to know why he didn’t save his mother, or why he loved her, but hated all else?

  I dislike that I’m a fan trying to tell you how to write the story: I’m not, I just hope these suggestions will inspire new ideas and directions, and help avoid some of the pitfalls previously seen in game to movie adaptations (cliched, flat characters).

• Dan // May 6, 2007 at 12:57 am

  No story worth investing your heart in, and characters that are flatter than a dime on a train track.

• flightless // May 8, 2007 at 11:26 am

  One major consideration: The film is not a game. The film is specifically not -the- game. It’s disheartening to see so many people commenting about strict rules and restrictions for what will make this a great film, and none of them is really worthwhile.

  Seriously, “some scenes MUST have the correct music”? If utter fidelity is what you’re concerned with, go play the game. It will always be correct.

  No one, not even you, -really- wants to see a perfectly faithful translation of the game into the film. If that were actually the case, what you’d really like to watch is exactly like the game, but with no interactivity.

  They are two different animals, and the houndish slavery and obligation to please folks who have a finely-tuned sense of what they think they want is what will derail this project.

  Take a common starting point, the mythos, and write a great film. Please don’t fall victim to the fallacy that a good film is what will satisfy the Castlevania fanatics. What they’re after might be technically faithful, but will inevitably be aesthetically soulless.

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