Hollywood's relationship with video game makers is finally coming to maturity after two decades of tension and mistrust, transforming the entertainment industry in the process, experts said.
The two industries, born from vastly different ages of technology, have long flirted with one another but are only now fully coming to terms with just how lucrative a strategic marriage can be for both.
In the past fortnight, a flurry of deals has been announced between Tinseltown's venerable old studios and the young upstarts of the multibillion-dollar game industry that will allow digital characters to make the leap from the gaming console to the silver screen.
The ultra-violent games Hitman and Alice, a dark interpretation of Lewis Carroll's children's classic Alice in Wonderland, will soon become feature films, with action star Vin Diesel portraying the assassin in the first film and Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar playing Alice in the second.
"What's happened recently is that a few things have come together," said Chris Marlowe, digital media editor for the Hollywood Reporter.
"Games have become more sophisticated, there happens to be a similarity of thought, so it might be easier for filmmakers to turn them into motion pictures," she said.
The two industries first had dealings in the early 1980s, with game makers adapting movie characters for the small box, with mixed results.
"In 1982, the ET video game on Atari 2600 was a huge flop," said Daniel Morris, editor-in-chief of the monthly US magazine PC Gamer, referring to the game version of Steven Spielberg's mega-hit film.
Millions of unsold ET game cartridges had to be crushed, dealing a devastating blow to Atari, despite its onetime 80 percent market share.
After barely three decades in existence, the video game industry's global turnover has topped US$28 billion a year and is expected to double again by 2008. The movie industry turns over just US$45 billion annually.
"In just two days, Halo 2 made US$120 million in sales, and the Hollywood moguls have seen that," Morris explained.
"No film made that in such a short time," he said of Halo 2, in which the player slays alien invaders in a realistic digital battle to the death.
Even the creator of the Star Wars movies, George Lucas, has bolstered his fortune through the success of LucasArts, which produces games with characters based on his intergalactic movie series.
But while the growing cross-over between the two once mutually suspicious industries used to consist of movies becoming games, the reverse is now increasingly true.
"Hollywood is always looking for new sources of inspiration, like novels, TV shows and now video games," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for Jupiter Research in New York.
"When there's a strong franchise, there's an opportunity to develop it into a film," he said.
But while a big-selling game franchise will achieve brand recognition with its fans, there is no guarantee that the concept will make a good film.
A 1993 movie based on the world's most popular electronic game, Super Mario, flopped spectacularly, leaving the two industries to reconsider just how far cross-over market appeal can go.
But their spirits were buoyed in 1995 by the success of the movie Mortal Kombat, starring Christopher Lambert, and, more recently, by the blockbuster hit Tomb Raider, a 2001 film based on a video game and starring Angelina Jolie, which also spawned a money-spinning 2003 sequel.
And the two industries now also work together on special effects, while actors including Dennis Hopper, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds and Judy Dench have all lent their voices to video games.
These successes and massive advances in video game technology have meant that the game industry no longer comes to Hollywood as an upstart child, but as the dominant partner in negotiations between the two media.
Software giant Microsoft reportedly demanded that studios stump up a US$10 million advance payment as well as a whopping 15 percent of gross receipts for the rights to transform its game Halo into a film.
All but two studios, 20th Century Fox and Universal, found the demand too rich and pulled out earlier this month.
Adding to the boost provided by the technological advances of video games was the demographic fact that former PlayStation fans are now in their mid-30s and are decision makers at the studios, Hollywood Reporter's Marlowe said.
"In the early days, [Hollywood turning to video games showed] a lack of imagination. Now, ... you have creatures that exist on their own," he said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would