Some adaptations of video games to movies just leave you shaking your head. The Angelina Jolie/Tomb Raider movies made a lot of sense. But Spore?
Electronic Arts announced today that Twentieth Century Fox and EA are teaming up to adapt the game Spore into an animated feature film. Ice Age’s Chris Wedge will direct. Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who wrote the screenplay for The Princess and the Frog, will write the screenplay for the Spore movie. EA and Blue Sky Studios will co-produce it.
The problem is that there is no story to Spore. It’s a game that exists upon user-generated content. It has no consistent world or characters either. Perhaps I have no imagination. But this just strikes me as a silly idea. They’re trying to apply a single narrative to a game that is fun because it is so open-ended, where users can create anything that they want. If you’re watching a film like this, your urge will be to create something that fits into it. Spore has sold millions of copies, but it has been a disappointment in overall sales.
Video game movies that have succeeded include the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and MaxPayne films. Doom the movie was just bad. We don’t need more of those. EA, however, now has six games that are going to be made into films. The others include: The Sims, Army of Two, Dante’s Inferno, Mass Effect and Dead Space (already made).