I (mostly) love the LotR films (except some really, really stupid deviations from Tolkien like the Arwen subplot or Gandalf vs the Witch-King etc) for what they are but you can tell that a person knows nothing about Tolkien when they shit more on The Hobbit movies lol.
The irony in calling LotR a "good" adaption (depending on how you define good).
If you define good as "true to the source material" then what people don't realize is that The Hobbit adaption is far truer to the source material. The LotR movies are full of major deviations while TH have a few minor.
@Shareazu nope, that isn’t the issue. Just compare Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie and the live action Street Fighter both from 1994. The animation movie actually tries to follow the story of the characters while the live action one sounds like the director only heard a one line description.
Now I'm thinking about the proposed Fallout TV series. Made by the writers that did West World. No idea how they are going to approach it. Kind of exciting, kind of scary. At least they shouldn't be able to mess up an existing character, right? Just hope they don't go for a save the planet story.
The thing with video game movie adaptations is that obviously a huge part of video games is, well, playing them. The player is immersed on the story by interacting directly with it. Without that component, a great deal of enjoyment is lost. Like @Rhuen said, it's hard to adapt the story.
What I see is that many movies based on video games and anime are basically some rejected shitty movie with the characters and location names changed. It is the equivalent of a shitty bootleg merchandise. They are just using the franchise name to sell shit.
*continued: A movie has to compress the story, and sometimes that 12 hours of gameplay story when passive and compressed is not as good as people thought: see original Mortal Kombat movie and Ratchet and Clank as examples of compressed story trying to be a movie.A series is sometimes the only option
A big problem has been the long history of directors/studios who thought just because its a game (or) anime that they can do whatever they want with it. A disrespectful approach. The other problem even when faithful is that games are an active observer experience while movies are a passive observer.
and for some games, the plot is simply too far from reality to even consider an adaptation. Maybe some CGI/animated adaptation that is just some extension to the lore, like the dead space movies or even the mass effect movie
It's ok, Jo, you can say "Die hard Arcade". Seriously, tough, the first Mortal Kombat was actually very good. The liberties taken weren't that many, and were kinda needed to get the action movie beying the arena stuff, but it worked well. Not sure about this new one yet.
You mention the Sonic, MK and Monster Hunter movies and I wouldn't disagree about any of them. But it seems to me that the Detective Pikachu movie would be (at least on the criteria provided) exactly what you're looking for.
It's faithful to the source to a fault, and a pretty good story.
