'Assassin's Creed' Trailer: Can Video Game Movies Score Their First Outright Win?

 

2016 is supposed to be the year that video game movies come into their own as a sub-genre on par with (relatively speaking) comic book, superhero movies or young adult, fantasy lit franchises. And the beleaguered genre will get four at-bats between April and December alone. Ratchet & Clank was a non-entity, while we are crossing our fingers for Duncan Jones’s Warcraft on June 10th .

The animated Angry Birds Movie from Sony  drops a week from Friday so that will be a fascinating one to watch. If it hits, that means that all of your favorite mobile games (Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja, etc.) are fair game for an animated feature adaptation. But the would-be “great hope” is 20th Century Fox’s ambitious adaptation of Assassin’s Creed.

I saw this trailer a few weeks ago when Fox invited some of us to see their CinemaCon sizzle reel. And I was impressed then, as I am impressed now. The film looks expensive and exciting, promising a source-faithful motion picture while offering newbies a stunt-filled action movie with “names” like Michael Fassbender, Marrion Cotillard, and Jeremy Irons. At a glance, it looks like a polished and potentially exciting action movie with lots of running, jumping, and fighting. But after watching Walt Disney DIS -1.17% blow what should have been an easy win with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time six years ago, my optimism is set to “cautious.”

The irony is that the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle, with $336 million worldwide, remains the biggest grossing video game movie of all time worldwide. But it earned just $90m in America and cost $200m to produce, so no franchise for you. In America, the top grosser remains Angelina Jolie’s original Tomb Raider, which earned $131m ($198m adjusted for inflation) back in 2001. That (not very good) would-be franchise is getting a reboot with Alicia Vikander, although I would imagine that a Jolie-starring reboot/sequel (assuming she had any interest in returning) would be just as bankable in 2016 as it was in 2001, if not more so.

Ubisoft Motion Pictures CEO claims the film takes its cues from Batman Begins, which is encouraging because Batman Begins is excellent, and Chris Nolan’s reboot was notable for being a character drama first and a comic book adaptation second. Hollywood (and various production houses big-and-small) have been making video game movies for at least 26 years, and we keep hoping to get one that is both unquestionably excellent and an unmitigated box office success. It remains amusing that we keep getting video game films despite no real breakouts to show the viability of the sub-genre.

It’s not that every comic book superhero movie is good or that every young adult fantasy film is a winner, but the popularity of said sub-genres were predicated on early triumphs. I doubt we would have gotten very many variations on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone if that first Harry Potter movie hadn’t done gangbusters business. And I doubt Hollywood would be chasing the comic book golden goose if (pick one) Superman: The Movie, Batman, or X-Men/Spider-Man had not gotten critically-acclaimed smash hits. And yet the sub-genre that was started 26-years ago by an infamous flop (Super Mario Bros.) still lives on.

So yes, Assassin’s Creed is one to watch for better or worse when it debuts on December 21st of this year. It will go up against Sony’s Jennifer Lawrence/Chris Pratt sci-fi drama Passengers, as well as the second weekend of Walt Disney’s Rogue One, although December legs means the film can survive into late January if it’s any good. We’ll see if the (allegedly) $150-$200 million Assassin’s Creed can buck the trend. Maybe video game movies are destined to be, at-best, B-movie genre entries like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. There is no harm in that, but there is clearly a desire to join the “A” list.

But for the moment, big scale video game-to-feature film adaptations seem to be the cinematic equivalent of the various nameless henchmen in any given action film, pressing onward confident in the belief that they, unlike their brethren, will totally defeat Jackie Chan/Arnold Schwarzenegger/Batman/etc. and not get beaten to a pulp.

Still, after what 20th Century Fox pulled off with Deadpool, I wouldn’t put anything past them. Assassin’s Creed opens December 21st. We’ll see.