Video game movies usually suck and flop at the box office. It seems nearly impossible to take the interactive experience of playing a game and turning that into a two-hour cinematic experience, where viewers simply have to sit there and watch rather than getting into the thick of things themselves. There have been exceptions. Angelina Jolie’s ‘Tomb Raider’ movies did fairly well and the ‘Resident Evil’ franchise ran for six movies. But for all of those, there’s everything from ‘Super Mario Brothers’, the ‘Mortal Kombat’ movies, ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Hitman’, ‘Max Payne’, ‘Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’, and loads more. Most recently, ‘Assassin’s Creed’ disappointed and ‘Warcraft’ outright flopped. Next up comes the reboot of ‘Tomb Raider’, which can hopefully live up to the first two films in terms of success and Dwayne Johnson’s ‘Rampage’ based on the old school 8-bit arcade game. Johnson previously starred in another video game-based film ‘Doom’ so he knows about the “video game movie curse.” But does he know how to avoid it?
This is what he said:
“I lived the video game curse because I made Doom. And Doom was a movie based off a very popular video game and was incredibly unsuccessful. So I lived the curse, and I experienced it. … Also making sure that there was a winking charm and humor in Rampage that, for me personally, was not in Doom.”
Johnson admitted that ‘Rampage’ (the game) didn’t have a lot to go on, other than “these people got transformed into giant animals and started wrecking the place.” The film deviates by having the monsters originate as actual animals who are mutated by chemicals.
Director Brad Peyton swears that nostalgic fans will appreciate the film adaptation:
“(Fans of the game) get all the things that you remember about it and you can smile about. But then there’s all this room to do things and build a story and build characters and do what I wanted. That allows us to exceed expectations and have a lot of fun and just deliver in a way that a good movie needs to deliver.”
Peyton previously directed Johnson in another disaster flick, ‘San Andreas’. Also part of the cast of ‘Rampage’ are Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Will Yun Lee, Malin Ackerman, Joe Manganiello and Naomie Harris.
‘Rampage‘ was recently bumped up a week to avoid ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ which also shifted its release date. ‘Rampage’ will now open on April 13.
Source: Total Film via Comicbook.com
