Movies based on video games have always been a tough nut for Hollywood to crack. Given the fundamental differences between the two mediums, it only makes sense. Video games are interactive stories, while moviegoers are necessarily passive. Video games frequently stretch on for 10, 20, 30, 40 hours — some even clocking in at 100 or more in order to see and do everything — while a movie rarely has more than a couple of hours to get the same ideas across. Video games are functionally animated, whereas the movies based on them rarely ever are: forcing the infinite possibilities of particulated pixels into the real-world constraints of live action filmmaking.
Now, there have been some fairly solid entries into this substrata of films over the years. Mortal Kombat (1995) was a really fun movie that’s held up pretty well in the years since. Although wildly uneven between installments, those Resident Evil movies average out to a perfectly watchable series. Silent Hill (2006) was a satisfying horror romp, even if it never really hanged together all that well. And I guess I didn’t really hate that very first Tomb Raider (2001) movie. But, more often than not, what we get looks like Super Mario Bros (1993) and Assassin’s Creed (2016).
There’s an untapped vein of hard cash for any studio able to crack the code for how to make a legitimately good movie out of this kind of source material. From The Legend of Zelda to Final Fantasy, from Dead Space to Metroid, there are decades of amazing stories and characters to work with, if only the pieces would fit together. It’s a billion-dollar industry, with the kind of reach and impact that the film industry hasn’t seemed to have in decades, and nobody in Hollywood seems to be able to make heads or tails of it. That is, perhaps, until now.
Although not the likeliest of properties to adapt, Detective Pikachu (2019) is gunning to be the first movie to fully solve the problem at hand: how to effectively adapt a video game into a major motion picture. Although it benefits from the Pokémon branding — incidentally, the highest-grossing media franchise of all time — it isn’t like they’re adapting the core games (Red, Blue, etc…) directly. Rather, this is a spinoff game in a niche genre that virtually nobody’s ever heard of, handled by the studio that’s currently tanking the supposedly ironclad stable of DC superheroes on what appears to be a mid-tier budget. And while they did manage to nab Deadpool (2016) star Ryan Reynolds, he’s going to route of Bradley Cooper in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): big, bankable, popular star voicing a CG character that necessarily can’t make use of his million-dollar good looks.
And yet, despite some off-putting CG, middling budget and genuinely bizarre creative decisions, the first trailer for the 2019 would-be blockbuster has entirely sold me on the premise. From the noir atmosphere to the deep-dive Poké-gags, from the Femme Fatale Jigglypuff to the promise of underground cage matches between our bright-eyed protagonist (Reynold’s Pikachu) and a flame-spouting Charizard, I’m 100% on board with this movie. It’s a fun-looking, funny-sounding, playful side-story in the Pokémon universe that takes itself juuuuust seriously enough.
If this is what it takes to figure out what to do about video games — an uncanny side-quest that seems so peripheral to everything else about this media franchise — then so be it. If this is what it takes to finally get Link, Samus and Mario on the big screen for real, I’m on-board. And if this actually turns out to be a great movie, awesome. It’s about time that the film industry figures out how to tell these kinds of stories.