Street Fighter movie: says give game movies a chance

Gamasutra has a great articleby Justin Marks, a game and movie scriptwriter who penned thescreenplay for the forthcoming Street Fighter movie. He doesn't talkmuch about that project (apart from assuring us it's a 'gritty,realistic character piece that just happens to use characters takenfrom a video game'). Instead, he takes on the standard gamer hypothesisthat Hollywood just doesn't understand or care about games and that'swhy so many game-to-movie tie-ins have been utter travesties.
Marks doesn't deny the turgid quality of previous works. What hedoes do, however, is argue that there's a new generation working behindthe scenes in the US movie business; he calls it 'nerd Hollywood', agroup of directors, writers and actors who've grown up as gamers andrespect the medium. "I know this because I work with these people everyday and play with them on Xbox Live every night... They're genuinelysmart people. And they genuinely want to make good movies," he asserts.
Marks places some of the blame for rubbish videogame movies on thegames themselves - on their lack of characterisation or interesting,innovative settings.

We all need to take a long look in the mirror andrealize that there are very few mainstream game franchises that couldstand next to the best comics of the 1980's, or the best movies ever.And yes, Shadow of the Colossus and Portal are hands-down better thanmost anything out there, but no one is playing those games. What is themainstream audience playing? Halo 3.

On the subject of the Halo movie, Marks presents a compellingargument as to why a movie couldn't work as a direct translation of thegame experience (apparently what Bungie and Microsoft were fightingfor): the finances don't work out. The movie would cost $200m, butMarks estimates that if the opening weekend is only attended by rabidfans of the games you're looking at a gross of $40m - "spend $200million dollars on that and you're looking at one of the biggest flopssince Ishtar. People lose jobs. Game over."
We've come at this argument a few times before, but this is aninteresting angle from the other side of the creative divide. I don'tthink Marks is really asking for games to change - Halo wouldn't workas some sort of deep character study, it's a shooter. (Although it'sworth pointing out that titles like Haze and Far Cry 2 are pushing intothis territory.) What he's saying is, gamers have to be prepared fortheir favourite titles to be re-imagined by this new breed ofdirectors. Games need to be jumping off points, not cinematicblueprints. That, I suppose, is what was attempted with the ResidentEvil movies, although they actually manage to be more shallow than their inspirations - which is saying something.
I'm always banging on about how JJ Abrams is influences by games -perhaps this is how game culture will finally stamp its mark onHollywood, not through explicit tie-ins, but through an almostsubliminal seeping of ideas and conventions from one medium to theother.