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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29299 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Sega is adapting Comix Zone into a movie. The old Sega Genesis game.

Comix Zone will revolve around "a jaded comic book creator and a young, queer writer of color who, when sucked into the final issue of his popular series, must put aside their differences to stop a dangerous supervillain from sowing complete destruction — and in the process wittily explore the ever-evolving power of storytelling itself."

No link, but it's on IGN and is easy to Google.

I first heard about this on a Sega podcast and the hosts didn't even think it was worth commenting on the young queer of color part.

This probably wouldn't be good anyway, but the shoehorned culture war element doesn't make me optimistic, either.

I think it was Mario Brothers that taught us video games tend to make terrible movies and visa versa. i'm not sure if it's because too much of the budget is spent on the licesnce or screenwriters don't like working on video game adaptions, or the mediums are too different or what, but I wouldn't expect this to be one of the exceptions (unless we learn the game was the director and lead actor's childhood favorite). That requires someone in the production caring a lot about the final product (like Vin Diesel's influence on Escape from Butcher Bay it wasn't getting released until he approved).

Ironically, I think the Sonic movies have truly broken the paradigm and shown that it really is possible to make a good video game movie. The new Mario movie coming out probably won't be too bad either.

I haven't seen it, but some people speak highly of the 2018 Tomb Raider movie.

Edit: there's also this scene from the 2007 Postal movie

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_tv7t79WY

2018 Tomb Raider is too bland and inoffensive to be interesting, but it's a pleasantly forgettable way to spend 2 hours.

In contrast, the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies are legitimately a lot of fun, in that early 2000s everyone in Hollywood just discovered Hong Kong wire work sort of way. They've always been favorite rainy day action movies in my family and I've never understood why no one ever mentions them when talking about video game movies.

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