BReading news: The internet is in an uproar over something impossibly trivial. Yesterday, Universal released its trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a first glimpse of the new big screen display of Nintendo’s beloved leak fixer. For most of the trailer’s two-and-a-half minutes, fans were happy enough: there was some cute CGI, familiar characters were present and correct, there were some soft PG-rated attempts at humor.
But then Mario opened his gulp and Chris Pratt’s voice came out. Not Chris Pratt’s voice with a cod Italian accent. Chris Pratt’s voice only. The response was immediate and furious. Right now, fans around the world are demanding that Mario’s voice be restored to his authentic Joe Dolce-with-a-concussion tenor.
It’s all eerily similar to the furor over another video game character, Sonic the Hedgehog, when the trailer for his big screen outing came out a few years ago. On that occasion, rather than what he sounded like, the outrage at what Sonic looked like – gone was the cute Sega sprite, instead was a stuffed squirrel with teeth straight out of the Big Book of British Smiles. You’ll remember what happened next: the fan reaction was so intense that Paramount postponed the release date to give Sonic’s illustrators time to return the spiky little fellow to his original doe-eyed form.
Supposedly there are plans for a similar reverse fret with the Mario movie. No doubt someone at Universal is frantically trying to lure Chris Pratt into a recording booth to conjure up the most culturally insensitive “When’ssa your Dolmio day” accent he can muster. But instead of giving in to the angry mob, I have another solution for studio execs: to stop making video game movies altogether.
Seriously, is all this worth it? Granted, there’s a lot of money at the end (Sonic did discouragingly well at the box office), but wouldn’t you rather be a little less financially well-off and not get yelled at? Video game adaptations have long been the third track — the middle Frogger job, if you will — of movie making. There are endless lists devoted to cataloging the many bad ones, and essays speculating on why it’s so hard to make a good one. Over decades and continents, great screenwriters have toiled 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 moviegoers alike. the same time.
Well guess what: maybe you can’t! Perhaps all video game adaptations are destined to feel like static, watered-down versions of the real thing. Certainly the Mario trailer gave off that sensation. Fully computer-animated and with visuals completely true to the games, it resembled a cutscene from a recent installment of the series, only at the end of it you couldn’t grab your controller and give a goomba a beating.
At least the latest attempt at bringing Mario to the movies – the historically awful Bob Hoskins starring Super Mario Bros – tried to mess with the formula a bit, tweaking the source material into some sort of cyberpunky body-horror mafia thriller (though much less interesting than that description sounds). Today, these adaptations need to be as unfailingly loyal as possible, with even the slightest hint of innovation evoking furious piles of the fanboys.
So, studio chiefs, how about not giving them the satisfaction. Delete all your video game movies from the upcoming slate. Get rid of Sonic 3. Cancel the Halo TV show. Clear the movie history of Super Mario Bros. and declare it as tax write-off like you did with Batgirl. Free us from this scourge of video game modifications for good.
But, oh really, leave the Last of Us TV series alone. That one looks pretty good…
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