This article is the second part of the "The End of Film and Television Content is the Game" series.
Text/Big Entertainer
In this era when the media forms are too complex, the game has gradually become a strong medium for the best of the best after collecting a variety of highly iterative technologies.
The TGA's award for Game of the Year this year to Joseph Fars, a creator who directed game production, is a metaphor for the fact that games have become real winners before the war between film and television is completely over. In an interview with IGN a few years ago, Fars mentioned the difference between making games and making movies.
"Game making is a lot harder than a movie, and I need to think about too many situations, but that's where the fun is. Compared with the old film industry, the young video game industry still has too many ideas to dig into, driving me to keep moving forward, and I am also deeply involved in it."
TGA Game of the Year
Game producer Josef Fares
This may have his resentment as a frustrated filmmaker, but it also points out a very real problem: the film production that has been in the past century does seem old-fashioned, and games, especially the next-generation AAA masterpieces that can carry more content and technology, have just entered the "youth era". This difference in vitality is reflected in the ever-expanding overall output value on the one hand, and on the other hand, film and television creation is increasingly dependent on the game industry, from technology to IP.
Of course, forget the cliché of "movies are dead", old age does not mean demise, but as movies and games continue to learn from each other in technology and narrative, the art of storytelling itself will always maintain its vitality, because people will eventually need to get joys and sorrows in it that can transcend reality.
The film narrative is weak, how can the game get on the spot?
Two years ago, the global box office in the pre-pandemic era had just reached a new high of more than $42 billion. It was also that year that the master film director Martin Scorsese sparked a debate about whether a Marvel work is a movie for a while because of a critical remark about marvel films.
Eventually, Martin Scorsese published a lengthy article in the New York Times commentary section expressing his views more systematically, though not many people really cared about the topic by then.
At the end, he writes: "Sadly, we now have two separate fields: one is audiovisual entertainment on a global scale, and the other is cinematic art. They still overlap from time to time, but this is becoming less and less common. I fear that the economic advantage of one side will marginalize the other and even shrink the other's living space. ”
It's hard to say that Scorsese's concerns are superfluous, and looking at the 2019 global box office list, the top ten works are almost exclusively a series or a second adaptation or remake of a well-known IP. "Avengers 4: Endgame", "Spider-Man: The Hero's Journey", and "Captain Marvel" have all won more than $1 billion in global box office, although comic films such as "Joker" have made history and won the Venice Golden Lion Award, one of the three major European films, but if it is not adapted from the most famous villain of DC Comics, can it still get a billion dollars at the box office?
Stills from the movie Joker
As for the CG version of "The Lion King" and "Fast and Furious: Special Operations", it is constantly breaking through the lower limit of Hollywood's poor creative ability.
In this case, Scorsese's words are less like prophecies and more like statements of reality. Studios' demand for box office has made IP more and more dependent, but the lack of original ability has led to the film as a narrative genre, which as a whole has lost its appeal to new audiences.
To this day, almost every well-known film director needs to respond to questions like "is a comic book adaptation a film" to some extent, but the film industry is completely different from two years ago.
According to Gower Street Analytics, this year's global box office struggled several times before it barely recovered to more than $20 billion, less than half of what it was before the pandemic. Paul Thomas Anderson, who has only released a new work after a few years, said that if Spider-Man: Homeless can get the audience back to the theater again, why not.
Stills from the movie Spider-Man: Homeless
And this is not the idea of PTA alone, in the case of the continuous impact of the epidemic on the film industry, Marvel movies seem to have become one of the few content products that can save the building from the top. But even the signature content of DC and Marvel, after appearing repeatedly every year and superimposing a large number of works of the same series on streaming media, it is still difficult not to cause aesthetic fatigue.
In addition to "Spider-Man: Homeless", another blockbuster work is still a sequel, that is, "The Matrix: Matrix Restart". In fact, most of today's Marvel movie fans may not have seen the "Matrix Trilogy" at all and do not care about this IP. However, this sudden reboot of the sequel, in terms of content, is undoubtedly a dog-tailed sequel, after losing further discussion of the philosophical speculation of the series of that year, the audience can see that the middle-aged Keanu · Reeves and Kerry-Ann Moss also need to engage in boring fights like "Quickstreaks."
The core of the constant sequels, spin-offs and reboots of old works lies in the lack of creativity, which intuitively means that it is difficult for Hollywood to continue to create new stories that make people shine.
New works always add an old story to a new spectacle, but spectacle is not the main reason why people choose to sit in the cinema for two or three hours, the story and the way the story is told is attractive in itself.
In fact, compared to the Matrix Reboot movie itself, at the TGA awards ceremony on December 10, Warner Bros. and game engine manufacturer Epic Games cooperated to launch the "Matrix Awakening: Unreal Engine 5 Experience" demo content, which made people feel how classic film and television content should be revitalized.
The Epic Games team performed high-resolution 3D scans of "The Matrix" actors
The 10-minute demonstration begins with a cinematic footage that follows a fast-paced car chase scene and explosion scenes, with a bird's-eye view of the city in its entirety.
It's hard to say that this work is a complete AAA game, it's more like a GTA-like open-world experience, except that this open world is cloaked in the cloak of "The Matrix". The entire virtual city map is 16 square kilometers in size. Players can observe all corners and details of the city by adjusting the camera angle, "even if the roadside flower beds, bus stops, and roof water tanks are all meticulous, any corner point into it is like a real picture." ”
According to Epic Games' official introduction to Unreal Engine 5, the entire city has 7 million instantiated assets consisting of millions of polygons. Because the movement of vehicles, character costumes, and the destruction of buildings were all simulated in the engine using Unreal Engine's Chaos physics system. In the chase experience, because the car accident is simulated in real time with Chaos, the same car accident will never happen twice, it is unique in each run.
And to experience The Matrix Awakening: Unreal Engine 5 Experience, the only next-gen consoles, such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, are currently available.
In fact, the importance of game engine technology for film and television production is often overlooked by the outside world, and Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 has played a central role in the virtual production used a lot in The Mandalorian in the past two years.
Not only technology, but now game IP is gradually becoming the main target of Hollywood competition.
In a sense, game IP has gradually become the comic of this era, and Hollywood has obviously benefited greatly from the creative source of comics in the past few decades. But adapting a game requires far more investment than imagined, which requires both time precipitation and new creators who can effectively combine two different mediums and create a new narrative form.
As the "ninth art", games need more cross-media influence
Even if there is resistance to the game, it is impossible not to admit that the boundaries between the game and the movie are becoming more blurred.
This doesn't just include cross-media presentations of stories with the same theme: for example, the Mad Max series has changed from a movie to a game, and the Tomb Raider series has changed from a game to a movie; it is also the interpenetration of the two arts in many aspects such as conception and production: many years ago, the German film "Lola Run" borrowed the game's repeated reading function in the narrative structure to make a so-called postmodern film that was praised by moviegoers.
Today, we are witnessing video games, especially AAA console games, from visual aesthetics, character settings, story styles, soundtracks, etc., from learning from the art of cinema, to gradually completing the transcendence of the latter. For example, "The Last of Us", "The Witcher 3", "Red Dead Redemption 2" and, more recently, "The Two-Man Trip", all tell a moving story in itself, but also provide a more immersive interactive experience, and the continuous emergence of these games makes the film narrative dwarfed many times.
Game Red Dead Redemption 2
Although for a long time, the vast majority of game adaptations of movies and dramas ended in failure, which directly led to the bankruptcy of the so-called "movie-game linkage" concept. But it's hard to say that this is the fault of one party, in fact, the change of media paradigm originally required a long preparation time, which is both technical reasons and generational changes, just like now veteran comic book lovers such as Kevin Feige finally grew up to create the "Marvel Universe".
As far as Hollywood's power structure is concerned, until recently, people who grew up with video games had the opportunity to become members or decision-makers in Hollywood's pyramid of power.
So what we can see in the future is not just more game adaptations, but better game adaptations.
We're now at a stage where those hired by big studios to lead game adaptations offer more than just technical expertise and glossy resumes. Today's writers, directors, and executives involved in game adaptations are almost all members of the group who grew up playing games, such as Epic Games' CTO Kim Libreri, who worked in Hollywood as a visual effects worker and worked on the Matrix trilogy. In addition, these people not only saw countless attempts to make these games classics, but were also able to learn from the failures of many film adaptations.
Since the release of the live-action movie "Super Mario Bros." in 1993, the game IP film and television has only been more than 20 years. More importantly, for a long time in the past, the filmization of games was mostly dominated by studios, and game companies either did not have much say or had no interest in IP adaptation. But this trend over the past decade has clearly changed dramatically as the gaming and film and television industries have flipped in their economic efficiency.
At the end of the day, game IPs are different from literary works or comics, the former often not belonging to individuals but almost always being owned by a large commercial company. It is difficult for Hollywood today to have much of an advantage in the face of these giants. Nintendo is a good example of this — millions of players have been looking forward to a Zelda legend or a Galaxy Warrior movie for decades, but Nintendo has shown no interest in such an adaptation.
Game "Galactic Warrior: Survival Fear"
And most major game studios actually struggle to get much out of licensing their IP for film or TV adaptations — for example, Netflix doesn't pay a high fixed copyright fee.
In fact, Microsoft, which has a market capitalization of nearly two trillion US dollars, does not need to receive millions of dollars in "Halo" episode copyright fees from the $18 billion ViacomCBS, because the latest Halo: Infinity alone can make Microsoft's gaming department a lot of money.
In the past, this kind of adaptation investment obviously did not have much return, and even disappointed IP fans. So why are game studios thinking about film adaptations, and why do they suddenly feel that these works need to be adapted now?
It's clear that the mindset of the game industry is shifting today, just as the mindset of the film industry is changing.
A new "Super Mario" movie will be released in 2021 or 2022. Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Sony PlayStation all have dedicated film/TV studios. PS masterpieces such as "The Last survivor", "Uncharted Sea", and "Battle of Tsushima" will become movies and dramas in the next two years.
The movie "Uncharted Sea" will be released in 2022
The refinement of game engine functionality and the expanding virtual assets have further contributed to this shift.
For example, Riot Games no longer outsources IP to studios for the development or design of their anime, as many game studios do. Instead, it can use many of the same tools, assets, and processes that are already used for its games. Although League of Legends: A Battle of Two Cities took six years to complete, Riot Games clearly got it right in terms of current word-of-mouth and views.
The answer to the question is simple: the expansion of diverse media will be key to ensuring the vitality of all IP, even the currently dominant IP, which wants to become more dominant in games, movies, television and books.
Audiences want more of their favorite stories and appear more frequently in more mediums. That's why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been able to boost the total box office for each of its films after growing from one or two movies to three a year. That's why the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes are now expanding to TV screens at a more intensive rate than movies, and well-known series like The Walking Dead keep trying to make so-called big movies.
One fact that makes artists like Scorsese feel helpless is that most audiences are receptive to narrative repetitive experiences that can be cross-media.
The A Song of Ice and Fire series sold about 15 million copies in its first 15 years, but in the 8 years since the premiere of the Game of Thrones episodes, about 85 million copies have been sold. After the Witcher 3 game fire, the 25-year-old Wizard book series made it to the New York Times Best Sell list for the first time. And as the Netflix series "Demon Hunter" hit the stream, the number of gamers grew 3-4 times, and the decades-old "The Witcher" series of books once again returned to the New York Times bestseller list.
Stills from the second season of the Netflix episode "Demon Hunters."
Most of us would rather spend more time immersed in familiar stories than trying a new story with risks every time. Consider how many people would have enjoyed the Mandalorian if there wasn't any "Star Wars" content in it?
Therefore, this is not really a war between games and movies as a communication medium, but a battle for dominance between all ambitious IP and various media.
In this era, every good story needs to seek a more diversified media expansion to occupy more and more leisure time of the audience.
Games, no matter how many times their output value has surpassed movies and TV series, is still a latecomer in terms of diversification.
Different historical stages will have different ways of telling stories, but in fact they are not an either-or relationship, and mutual borrowing and common development are often the final result. As David Finch recently made for Netflix in his documentary about film, Voir, specifically mentions the confrontation and fusion of film and television for decades, "At the end of the day, what really matters is the story that captures your imagination, no matter what form it takes."
In fact, the same applies to today's movies and games, when the two no longer cling to the old and new stereotypes and genre boundaries, the free flow of IP and technology will instead allow the media itself to give birth to new ideas for telling good stories.