Certainly the Mario trailer gave off that sensation. Well guess what: maybe you can’t! Maybe all video game adaptations are destined to feel like static, watered-down versions of the actual thing. Across decades and continents, great screenwriting minds have laboured over how to capture the kinetic qualities of video games – their playable characters, their endless, open-world settings – and transfer them to the big screen in a way that satisfies gamers and cinemagoers at the same time. There are endless list pieces devoted to cataloguing the many bad ones, and essays speculating on why it is so hard to make a good one. Seriously, is all this worth the hassle? Granted there’s a big wodge of cash at the end of it (Sonic did dispiritingly well at the box office) but wouldn’t you rather be a bit less financially well-off and not shouted-at? Video game adaptations have long been the third rail – the middle Frogger lane, if you will – of moviemaking. But instead of acquiescing to the angry mob, I have a different solution for studio execs: stop making video game movies altogether. No doubt someone at Universal is frantically chivvying Chris Pratt into a recording booth to summon the most culturally insensitive “ When’sa your Dolmio day” accent he can muster. Presumably there are plans afoot for a similar reverse ferret with the Mario movie. You’ll remember what happened next: the fan response was so intense that Paramount delayed the release date to give Sonic’s illustrators time to return the spiny little fellow to his original doe-eyed form. On that occasion, instead of how he sounded, the outrage was over how Sonic looked – gone was the cutesy Sega sprite, in its place was a taxidermied squirrel with teeth straight out of the Big Book of British Smiles. It’s all eerily similar to the furore over another video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog, when the trailer for his big screen outing dropped a few years back.
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