Castlevania the Movie: Whip it! Into shape!

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Author: Matthew Keast
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A film adaptation of the Castlevania series seems to be in limbo. Considering the director and track record of gaming movies, that might not be a bad thing.

It's possible until now that you didn't even know there was a Castlevania movie being made, and personally I'd forgotten about it. Paul Anderson, beloved wrecker of Alien VS Predator, originally signed on to the movie in 2005 to write and direct. But now, it seems he doesn't like the direction the movie is going, though he's still putting on a gameface for the press. Considering the "direction" he thought would be good for the Aliens and Predator franchises, maybe the Castlevania movie is actually better off for it.

Paul Anderson screwed up this. THIS!

A lot of gamers will say that the first Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil movies (not the steaming-piles that were their sequels) were actually decent adaptations. I can agree to a certain extent. There were aspects of both movies that I liked, but it still remains that the acting was pretty god-awful in both, and Resident Evil followed the annoying trend of significantly changing the course story line of a game.

Based on Anderson's track record and the history of the game adaptations in general, you can bet that Castlevania has been shaping up to be a science fiction movie where Dracula is a cyborg. Now, I understand exactly why changes are made when doing a videogame movie. It's impossible to just take the exact story out of a game and paste it into film. Yet it seems that directors make arbitrary decisions for changing aspects of games. For instance, in the Resident Evil movie, they could have easily kept the mansion location from the first Resident Evil game, or even focused on the streets and police station from the second game, while still making the necessary changes to fit the narrative structure of film. Sometimes I think directors change large parts of their source material just because they can. Some part of their ego needs to feel as if they've put their own spin on the subject.

And that is why movie adaptations of videogames will continue to fail in the future. They are inherently a form of fan service, and if a director can't drop his ego and let the good parts of a game shine through, the fans will never be happy.

Hey, thanks: Destructoid

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