Wow, someone has been tricked into making a Red Faction movie. That blows my mind. I base this on the first Red Faction for the PS2, which I don’t recall enjoying at all. Maybe it’ll be the first time we say the opposite of, “Eh, the book was better.”
THQ has developed something called a “trans-media strategy,” which is a fancy way of saying that THQ wants to branch outside of the video game business. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, making a couple of extra dollars by tricking some production company into turning Red Faction into a movie. Although now that I think of it, Metro 2033, a THQ-published game that I bought last week (and according to the new Steam UI I have played for a whopping three hours so far), could be a good movie, provided it was done correctly.
I mean, it won’t be done correctly, so it’s best to just enjoy the game as-is.
THQ has promised that it’s going to be more than merely selling the rights to its game to some pinhead Hollywood studio, saying it’s “going to be doing the most robust trans-media plays anybody’s ever seen in the games business.”
I’m only like 200 words into this post and I’m already sick of the phrase “trans-media.” It sound so cold, you know?
Then again, video games are “good” because they’re interactive. You yourself are part of the action, and that’s a completely different experience from sitting back and watching Magnolia on your fancy TV. (That movie’s use of music is right up there with The Thin Red Line and The New World.) You can’t just shoe-horn a video game into a movie script and call it a day, as we’ve seen time and time again.