Last week, Halo showrunner that the team behind the upcoming live-action series wasn’t interested in sticking to the source material. “We didn’t loo🀅k at the game. We didn’t talk about the game,” he said, much to the ire of Halo fans around the world. “We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.”
Alarming as this might sound coming from a creative lead, Kane isn’t the only video game adapter who has blatantly disregarded the source material. From 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil to Sonic the Hedgehog, video game movies have always bastardized the game🌳s they’re based on - for better or worse. The reason for this is simple, though misguided: why make a show for the fans when you꧟ can make a show for everyone?
In that same Variety interview, Paramount Plus chief programming officer says this explicitly. “This is a swing for a broad audience,” she says. “My hope is this expands what the Paramount Plus brand can mean.” Giles talks about NFL dads enjoying the show with their teenage sons and impressing her own teenage sons by her proximity to Halo. It’s very corporate, very cringe, but it isn’t anything new. The logic she’s using is the same we’ve seen used for decades when it comes to video game adaptations. Halo has a built-in audience that’s going to watch it no matter what, so let's make a show that appeals to people that aren’t Halo fans.
It would make sense if not for the fact that it never, ever works. The problem is that everyone knows what Halo is, and if the💮y don’t play it then they won’t care about the show. 💙The only thing that brings non-gamers into video game movies is the enthusiasm of fans. Positive word of mouth is what made Arcane such a huge success for Netflix last year. Gamers and fans of League of Legends loved it and badgered their friends and family members into watching it. It was a good show that appeals to a broad audience, but it wouldn’t have been such a success if it had taken its built-in audience for granted.
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Arcane was an anomaly in the world of video game adaptations. Here’s what normally happens: a video game movie comes out, let’s call it “Monster Hunter”, 🐬and non-gamers don’t care. The fans of this hypothetical Monster Hunter series see it and tell everyone how awful it was because of how much it disrespected the games. If I know a Monster Hunter fan, I’m likely to take their word for it. They would know better than anyone, after all. This is why almost every video game movie turns out to be a dud. The players hate it, and the non-gamers don’t care.
When Kane says “I never felt limited by it being a game”, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant that he didn’t feel like he was restricted, creatively, by the source material. What he actually said indicates that he believes games, as a medium, are limiting. It's an absurd belief to anyone who plays games in all their wonderful forms and varieties, but it aligns with the kind of elitism we’ve seen from Hollywood time and time again. As a guy in his 50s, Kane comes from an era when games were considered toys for children, incapable of the kind of artistic merit or pedigree of film. A lot of his generation aren’t engaged with games and aren’t aware of how much the medium has matured since the days of Pac-Man. You’d like to think the showrunner of a series based on one of the most critically acclaimed video game series of all time would be a little more plugged in, but apparently not.
This doesn’t bode well for the Halo series, which will see its episodes released weekly on Paramount+ starting this Thursday. Editor-in-chief 1🌊68澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stacey Henley reviewed the first two episodes and wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it, citing stilted performances and uninspired visuals. It remains to be seen whether fans will feel alienated, but Kane’s comments certainly don’t inspire a lot of confidence. Maybe this 𒅌will be🌜 the wakeup call Hollywood needs to finally stop “swinging for a broad audience” and just make something that won’t piss off the actual audience, but at this point, I doubt they’ll ever learn.
