After years of terrible Hollywood adaptations, video games finally found a home on Netflix
Castlevania was originally imitating the Universal Monster movie, sending an orange guy with a whip to beat the mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, and the villain Dracula.Castlevania, this show, explored the relationship between four immortal vampire queens in the fourth season, reflecting on how we deal with grief, and It looks absolutely incredible in sportsI don’t think this is what anyone expected, but seven years after the last (defamated) Castlevania game, the Netflix series has become the new benchmark for video game adaptations.
I can imagine another universe where we never got Netflix’s Castlevania because Konami is still scarred by the disastrous Hollywood adaptations of the 90s. Dolph Lundgren is Simon Belmont of the Hornet and John Travolta is the most overridden Dracula in the history of the screen. This movie is so sensational that its only enduring cultural heritage is Dolph slamming a ridiculous fake Medusa head. Virus reaction gif until its eyes were dug out.
But in this reality, we get a cartoon that combines philosophy, long and thoughtful dialogue with toilet humor and extreme violence. We never have to put up with Travolta’s “what is a man” speech. After decades of Hollywood making bland, crappy, or outright shit video game movies, the video game adaptations in recent years have been amazing, because TV finally gave them some respite.
The curse has been broken, and we mainly want to thank Netflix.
Hollywood movies are never suitable for games. There may be a hundred reasons, but if you look back at most of the adaptations from the 90s and 2000s, you will see that the big questions are capitalized. The author rarely captures what really makes the game attractive. The big movie stars of the time played roles that they didn’t fit; the stories were either too close to the game (cheese alert), or they barely felt the adaptation (who were these even for?). Coupled with the usual low budget and B-level directors, it’s no wonder they are almost all classified as “Bad Movie Night”.
The video game movies of the nineties have a special bad taste, and I still like it very much-I will appear in Street Fighter or Ssangyong every five years or so, just to laugh-but the continuity of bad game movies continues until The 2010s. I drank a lot of Russian beer while watching Warcraft, but I was still shocked by how terrifying it was. The best-case scenario is that we get something like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which is an uncomfortable whitewash, but a somewhat capable adventure movie. Most of them are worse, or just boring replicas of games we’ve already played, such as Assassin’s Creed.
If the filmmaker thinks that the adaptation can enrich the source material in some way by constructing a background story of familiar characters or beautifying the game world with more details, it will never be shown on the screen. In the past few years, with Castlevania, wizards, and especially arcane, the derivative products of League of Legends have truly achieved breakthroughs, and this situation has finally changed.
Arcane is what a show looks like when there is enough time to cook.I have never seen a 3D animation like this: Arcane may not surpass Pixar in original details, but it belongs to its own category in style. It incorporates 2D animation for special effects and detours into completely different animations. Eye-catching one-off scene.
Equally important is that Arcane’s role here has gained depth that they have never had in MOBA, enriching alliances and confrontations with tragic background stories and political speeches and relationships that have enough screen time to feel real. The most common opinion I have seen about Arcane is that whether you have played League of Legends or not, this is a great show, which is a rare honor for game adaptation. For fans, this is even better: they can spend hours immersing in a world they have only seen in concept art and short films. The popularity of arcane has been fed back to LoL.
Castlevania also uses game heroes and timelines as springboards to create a richer character-driven story. And it is not afraid to completely reshape certain characters so that it can do more with them.Isaac is the richest character in the show and works in the knot of hatred and self-loathing every season, which makes some of its Best conversationAt the same time, in the PS2 game “The Curse of Darkness”, he is yours Typical laughing villain Dress up for the bondage party. Since the 90s, I haven’t watched every video game movie in Hollywood, but I can’t think of one that can make the character better.
Wait, I take that back. There happens to be one.
Time is really critical here: neither Arcane nor Castlevania tried to cram the full game world into a two-hour movie, but used their episodes to dig deeper. “The Witcher” has more in common with Hollywood adaptations-a big part of the attraction is that “famous movie stars appear in reality shows, oh, it’s expensive”-but it also benefits from time and true commitment to the source Star material.
Not all Netflix adaptations have reached these high points. Dota: Dragon’s Blood is a competent but universal fantasy, and Capcom has been making crappy CGI Resident Evil movies for years, and it happens to stay up to date on streaming media.The new Carmen Sandiego series does look like a winner, but I will never admit that it doesn’t My leaderThe bad adaptation certainly won’t go away, but it’s still exciting to experience the moment when it’s not the only way for them to end. Bad is not even the default setting anymore.
The flexibility of streaming means that game adaptations can take the form it needs, rather than being mixed into the same general model. In this new era, the Witcher series can become expensive large-scale fantasy shows, Netflix’s attack on Game of Thrones, and the animation-derived Nightmare of the Wolf can fully play its role as a slaughter festival starring sexy Vesemir. It has no pressure to explain the entire wizarding world to mainstream audiences.
For these shows, streaming is undoubtedly a better format than Hollywood movies, but the bigger reason why these shows are excellent is that they are only made by real people Playing video games And understand them. Arcane was originally a pet project of Riot; Castlevania animators Sam & Adam Deats Grow up in the game. If one day Henry Cavill can’t appear in the Warhammer series, it will be a huge loss for all of us.
Castlevania is the pioneer of a new generation of game adaptations, but Wizards and Arcane are the shows that will inform the game adaptations of the next ten years, because they have that kind of atmosphere prestige. Soon after, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, and all other streamers started looking for games for their next billion-dollar epic. “Mass Effect” seems to be about to happen, so it may only be a matter of time before “Fallout” or other series get the treatment of “Uncle Penny”.
Hollywood will continue to try, but the latest evidence shows that they hardly see any signs of surpassing the same type of film they have been making. Uncharted looks like Uncharted, but it won’t be better than playing Uncharted, and it won’t make playing Uncharted better. The Borderlands with Kevin Hart and Cate Blanchett is a wildcard, but this seems to be another movie, and as an animated series that has time to explore Pandora, the effect will be better. The game adaptation now belongs to the anchor, and we just saw the first few examples where they can do better.