Hollywood is in crisis... and it thinks video games are the answer

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Opinion: Movie studios are desperate for gaming's cash, reveals film journalist Jamie Russell...
Hollywood is in crisis. Last year, box office attendance sank to its lowest level for 16 years. The industry's chief execs are already soul-searching. Universal president Ron Meyer shocked everyone by confessing: "We make a lot of shitty movies. Every one of them breaks my heart."



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Hollywood is in crisis. Last year, box office attendance sank to its lowest level for 16 years. The industry's chief execs are already soul-searching. Universal president Ron Meyer shocked everyone by confessing: "We make a lot of shitty movies. Every one of them breaks my heart."
Opinions vary why box office attendance is falling: Poor quality control? Online piracy? The recession? Or is it the rise of videogames? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 made $1 billion in 16 days, becoming the biggest entertainment launch in any medium ever. "Call of Duty is more than a game," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision. "It's become a major part of the pop cultural landscape."

He's right. Games are becoming complete entertainment franchises, and companies like Ubisoft and Valve are branching out into comic books, novels, toys and web shorts. "It's pretty clear that our customers are cross-media consumers," Gabe Newell at Valve explained a couple of years ago. "If they like a game, they want to see a movie; if they like a movie they want to be able to run around and shoot rockets off in those spaces. They're telling us we don't have the luxury of just being a games company anymore."So, in one corner we have a struggling business. In the other, a rapidly growing industry that's expanding beyond its core competency. Hollywood needs videogames as much as videogames need Hollywood. There's just one problem: neither side understands the other.
YOU SAY TOMATO...

The two industries are as alien to each other as the Borg and Ewoks. Games are based on code, algorithms and CPUs; publishers see themselves as technology companies first and foremost. Hollywood is glitz and glamour; it's an industry of ego. Putting the two worlds together is a cross-cultural clash.
"We don't share the same language," reckons designer Jason Vandenberghe, a veteran of EA, Activision and Ubisoft. "Hollywood is a culture of personality where people with strong personalities can convince you even if they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. The game industry sells systems. We don't trust those types of personalities. It's an engineering culture where you have to know what you're talking about. You can't be a bullshitter."
It's a culture clash with a long and colourful history. In the 1970s, Warner bought out Atari and tried to turn games like ET: The Extra-Terrestrial into extensions of movie marketing. It was a strategy that crashed the US games videogame industry overnight and took videogames back to zero until Nintendo stepped in.

In the '90s and '00s the same thing happened again: Hollywood saw the videogame industry's revenues, panicked and raced to get a slice of the action either by opening their own studios or by bringing Hollywood talent into games. It always ended badly. Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive is one of many studio game divisions that folded, eventually reemerging as EA LA. Meanwhile, actors' egos were bruised when they realised that games didn't need celebrities.EGO STROKING

The people caught in the middle of all this were the talent agents who had to mollycoddle filmmakers and stars to help them understand the new gaming medium. One former agent at International Creative Management told us: "I've had actors and actresses who did voice-work on games require hair and makeup at reception".

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He wasn't joking. Worse still, Hollywood talent just couldn't understand that they weren't the main draw in this new medium - put Brad Pitt in the voice cast of the next GTA and see if it sells more copies. It won't. Games are an attack on the very value equation (celebrity = profits) that Hollywood is based on. No wonder the movie studios don't get games.
It's not all the movie studios' fault, though. Game companies have been easily seduced by Hollywood. When Sega sold the movie rights to House of the Dead, former Sega of America president Peter Moore made a marathon overnight trip from his office in San Francisco to Vancouver to take a zombie cameo in the film. He spent all night in a rainy forest shooting his scenes, then flew back to work the next morning still pulling makeup off his face. All for a turkey in the bottom 100 of IMDb's ratings. "Back in the '90s, videogame companies still had an inferiority complex," is his excuse.

Since then, game companies have moved into comics, novels and even toy ranges. But that inferiority complex has prevented it from cracking Hollywood. Traditionally, games publishers have either sold the rights to their IP to movie producers for peanuts in the hope of getting some free publicity, or have simply refused to be courted.Spielberg and DreamWorks tried to romance Valve in hope of getting a Half-Life movie made. But the company didn't get the progress to production agreement or the deal on the sequel they wanted and it floundered. Even with Spielberg in the room, Valve stubbornly stayed in the driving seat.



Likewise, Rockstar turned down offers for a GTA game. "Everybody in Hollywood wanted Grand Theft Auto," remembers former Creative Artists Agency agent Larry Shapiro. When he tried to get Sam Houser to agree, though, the response was clear: "There's no way I'm doing it." Houser was convinced that a movie would only tarnish Rockstar's $1 billion IP.
GAMING GROWS UP

Marvel comic book fans know what happens when a great publisher gives movie studios free reign. They had to sit through dross like the 1990 Captain America movie with their head in their hands. Today, though, comic book movies are the brightest lights in the blockbuster firmament. Why? Because Marvel took control of its own IP in the late '90s. Suddenly the quality spiked and we got superhero movies like Blade, X-Men, Iron Man, and soon, The Avengers.
Videogame companies need to learn the Marvel lesson. The old model of licensing games for movies for a quick buck is dead: nobody wants any more Uwe Boll movies or another Van Damme Street Fighter flick. What if, instead, a games company became an equal partner in the moviemaking process? That's what Ubisoft are trying to do with the Assassin's Creed movie that's in development under an unprecedented contract with Sony Pictures.