Good news. Now you can heap even more loathing upon what Resident Evil has wrought in the lusty makeout session between gaming and film. In a bid to subsidize costs from an increasingly tough market in gaming, Capcom, the video game developer of classics like Vulgus, Kai, Block Block and… oh yeah, Resident Evil and Street Fighter, is expanding their ambition for all things licensed.
With Resident Evil‘s success, Devil May Cry and Onimusha under development and Street Fighter giving a double nut kick to Bison and Jean-Claude Van Damme in 2008, the Japanese video game powerhouse is on the move with not only licensing, but production as well. At the very least, Capcom will be more heavily involved with film and game tie-ins not seen since the spectacularity that was and is Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. They’ve even hired a Hollywood liason (Germaine Gioia, formerly of THQ) and have plans in moving some Japanese developers to LA. Will Capcom’s Hollywood push include potential film properties of Dead Rising (time to sue, Mr. Romero!), Lost Planet (pictured above) and Megaman? Who knows, but this move seems a natural progression for a big gaming company like Capcom, as game developers and Hollywood tighten their derivative grip on one another.
While involvement like this can only resurrect the teased out debate of video game movies always sucking, the video game aspect is irrelevant. A bad video game movie isn’t any more terrible than a bad book, short story, skit, screenplay or based-on movie. Terrible movies that dry hump 2-3 hours of our lives at a time are bad based on execution, (be it acting, directing, production design, budget, etc.) not simply because the source material happened to be based on a video game (check out any one of the worst of 2006 lists). Unfortunately, bad doesn’t mean unsuccessful, as the Resident Evil series is Sony Pictures most successful franchise, right behind Spider-man.
At some point, the time and love will be invested in material coming out of a video game to put the whole argument to rest. In the mean time, does this just mean more shitty genre movies, or seeds of genre hope being planted for a future of fun cinemetic entertainment? You decide.