Kurtz + Orci +Universal = $$$???

Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci are the best filmmakers you’ve neverheard of; notice I didn’t say your never seen. Their name has been associated with some of the best entertainment content of the past decade, from Mission Impossible III, Transformers, Star Trek, and The Amazing Spiderman. They started out producing television in the late 90s with shows such as Hercules and spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess, but their big break didn’t come until the show Alias, which after it aired was basically their license to print money.

Recently Universal Studios acquired Legendary Pictures as part of a 5-year co-financing and distribution deal, which is slated to help Universal recapture a lot of the film market which has been lost to them over the years. The first film slated to come from the collaboration will be a reboot of Dracula, a property that Universal owns the rights to. Kurtzman and Orci are also slated to produce the forthcoming Van Helsing and Mummy reboots as well. Although Orci and Kurtzman are some of the biggest heavy hitters in Hollywood they have yet to really hit heights of success that Disney and Marvel have with and Phase 1 of the Marvel Universe films (Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America). Those films were all tied together with an interweaving story that led up to The Avengers, which grossed $1.5 billion at the box office.

This power duo arriving at Universal can mark the beginning of the turnaround for the film studio. They are planning on using Universal’s library of movie monsters and apply them to a Marvel like universe to establish a running story line throughout the franchises. After the success of the Avengers every studio would be looking to cash in like that, the most obvious would be Warner Bros. and DC comics with their universe of superheroes most notably Batman and Superman, which their working on a film for as we speak.

What makes the duo unique and more likely for success in this endeavor is that they can basically have free reign of all the characters seeing the Universal owns the rights, not to mention their background with TV shows that naturally have overarching plot elements and currently their work on FOX with the new Sleepy Hollow series seems like fertile ground to hone their skills in the horror genre. If Universal is able to leverage their newfound partnerships with Kurtzman and Orci, as well as Legendary Pictures they can begin to be on track to returning to be a true powerhouse in the film industry once again and regain their title which they hold long ago.

Video games furthering in to film territory…

Due to the business reality of the gaming industry there are many different ways in which the gaming and film industry are blurring the lines. With both mediums having massive budgets of $200 Million and up it is easy to see the similarities. Like films, games are made by a studio; creative people lead the vision and large groups of workers go about creating it. There are even actors, directors, series’, and award shows. There are huge studios creating games while others are independent.

If you look at how big games are marketed today you see that like film, they are focused entirely around character and plot and not the differentiation factors such as gameplay and mechanics. This began when games became a real moneymaker in the 1990’s and studios began reaching out to ad agencies that started out working on campaigns for studio films, hence the similarity in the marketing style. Even today more and more studios are looking to up the marketing budget to reach the casual gamer by drawing them in with extras like a music video featuring a song done for the game by a popular artist. Eminem has a new video for his song “Survival” that is featured in the new Call of Duty: Ghost game. In the video he has never before seen footage of gameplay not only getting fans to watch his video for the song but for new gameplay footage of their favorite game, that’s a win-win situation.

In my opinion, the similarities should end there at the business aspect. We should look at the warning signs of merging the two industries. When a video game is adapted in to a film the general consensus is that it will most likely be a terrible experience. Cases in point Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Mortal Kombat (1995). All films that tanked at the box office because of how bad they were filmed and were panned by critics.

Vice-versa when a video game is based off a movie it does equally as bad if not worse consistently. Now here is a point where I believe that shows how the film industry sees the gaming industry as a cash-cow and not a legitimate storytelling medium, when a movie comes out a corresponding video game is created to be released along side it just to generate the film more money. The problem with these games is that they are given short time frames in which to create the game and end up generally with a sub par product released by a second rate-developing studio that just needed the money, instead of crafting a meaningful experience to tie in with the movie and are just dismal products.

Now, I have gone on and on about how games and films should be divided but there have really been some legitimate efforts to bend the rules for what a game can be. In 2011, Rockstar Games LA: Noire was the first game tobe screened at Tribeca Film festival. This marked a jump for games to be considered cinema because of the advanced techniques used in unique facial capture technology that filmed the actors faces using multiple cameras to create a life like image in the game. This year Tribeca Film Festival invited Quantic Dream Studios and director David Cage were to screen their game Beyond: Two Souls, which starred film actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It is a game that heavily focuses on plot and storytelling by jumping back and forth to different parts of the Ellen Page character’s life, becoming more of an interactive storytelling experience rather than a traditional game. 

If more games continue to follow the trend of push the technology to be able to tell a better story I’m all for it, but if the entertainment industry is just going to use this to throw a business model of movies are becoming unpopular and we need jump on video games, count me out. All that will accomplish is to destroy what made video games great in the first place by turning it into a money machine and destroy the art like they have with the film industry.