Game/Movie crossroads

Some games that were made into movies:
Doom
Resident Evil
Silent Hill
Mortal Kombat
Super Mario Bros
Hitman

I find it interesting that the movie world and the game world can't function in better harmony. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we have come to expect weak story in games (compared to a movie, that is), but when we see something on the big screen we expect no plot holes, good acting, and we expect the movie to stay truthful to the game source material.

The problem is the story in the games will contradict our high movie story standards. Take Doom for example. In the games, humanity had accidentally opened a portal that leads straight to hell, and everything in hell is using it to escape into our world. Your mission: kill it all before it reaches the rest of humanity. There are no further events in the story beyond killing everything. No twists, no big reveal. That's the whole premise. Would you go see that movie? Me neither. When the Doom movie came out, I saw it and was disappointed. They added a whole team of soldiers instead of our one "lone ranger" we play as in the game and the monsters were genetic mutations (and most certainly were not from hell). All in all, it was nothing like the game. But the more I thought about it, if they kept true to the source material, there would have been no story what so ever. Basically the audience would've just watched someone play through the game. So, they have to make some stuff up and throw it in for story.

So, how will we ever get a decent game-to-movie adaptation that people will flock to? Maybe the games need higher story standards. Maybe we need to lower our movie expectations when the film is based on a game. Either way, something's got to give.

There are a few exceptions; The Hitman movie for example, I own and enjoy. It seems to be modeled after the Jason Bourne series. Jason Bourne is The Man, so maybe I have a biased opinion.

Now, the only thing worse than a movie based on a game is a game based on a movie. Was there ever a good one? Every kid's movie ever made has some half-assed game adaptation where you play as the main character, moving through the events of the film. The graphics are usually extremely weak and the game play and physics are garbage.

Even decent movies have run of the mill, unsuccessful games made out of them. What I keep wondering is why do the movie companies bother? One of two things needs to happen. Either they need to dramatically raise their game standards, or they need to stop making these awful games, because they can't be making money off of these titles.

Example. Watchmen: great (!!) graphic novel, awesome movie (thank you Z. Snyder), crap games. IGN gave it a 5 out of 10 and a solid "Meh".

My theory is that the movie studio, who has the final say on content, knows nothing about the gaming industry. I can just imagine a game designer rolling his eyes when some money-hungry movie exec is telling him what to include in a game, and completely gets it wrong.

As a whole, these two industries have a lot to learn about each other before we can get a quality product. Supposedly our Halo movie is still being made (article) lets hope they get it figured out before it hits theaters.