Video-game movies so rarely get off the ground, and, when they do, they end up performing poorly at the box office and getting critically panned. So, it might be time for studios to pull out all of the stops.
When video-game movies get produced, the budget usually isn’t high enough, the studio doesn’t have a grasp on the source material, and the company relies on savvy marketing to get butts in seats, but that just isn’t enough. For a truly great video-game movie to be made, there needs to be a visual auteur in the driver’s seat with all the backing they need.
Between Christopher Nolan’s movies’ complex narratives, giant set pieces, and the director’s insistent use of the IMAX camera, the only difference between a Nolan film and a video game is that the movie isn’t playable, which makes the director perfect to direct a vide-game IP.
TimeSplitters
With Christopher Nolan now having tackled the biggest movie concept of them all, time-travel, there’s no better director for TimeSplitters, as Tenet made more sense than a lot of other time-travel movies. That’s not the only parallel, either, as both the video-game series and the director share a love of James Bond. The first level of TimeSplitters 2 features a dam, which is a direct reference to the first level in Goldeneye 007, and the filmmaker has often expressed his love of the spy series.
The first-person shooter sees players jump through time and land in exciting periods such as the Wild West, the prohibition era, and hundreds of years into the future. As most of Nolan’s movies have all been set in the present day, TimeSplitters would be the perfect vehicle to explore some historical periods.
Half-Life
When it comes to the narrative of Nolan’s movies, sometimes, they can be a little too complex, and, when a character has finished a five-minute monologue full of exposition, viewers can be left more confused than they were five minutes earlier. However, despite the fundamentals of what’s going in the movie not being completely clear, the simple rules of the world and what’s at stake is what really matters, and that’s just the same as the Half-Life series.
Not only that, but the sci-fi game is full of mystery with ambiguous endings, just like the best Nolan movies. As the series is now more than two decades old, we still haven’t gotten answers to the game’s biggest questions such as who G-Man is and what really is inside the Borealis, the research vessel that vanished for decades.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 may have gotten off to a rocky start. As it was years in the making and got overly hyped after so many delays, it was inevitably going to disappoint a large chunk of players. However, the boring open world and glitch-riddled mechanics may have held the game back, but the engaging main quest is one of the reasons why it’s game of the year material.
Set in a future with divided class systems where there are just as many flying cars as there are high rise slums, the frantic game even already has a movie star, Keanu Reeves. It’s almost as if Cyberpunk was meant to be a movie instead of a video-game. As there’s already a great story, the director could elevate it tenfold, which is what he did with the source material for Insomnia, The Prestige, and Batman Begins.
The Division
Set during the aftermath of a global pandemic, the game follows a rag-tag group who try to get to the bottom of the pandemic and combat the criminal activity that inevitably followed. Nolan would be best behind the wheel of The Division purely because of all of the actors in his Rolodex.
As Nolan is one of the directors who casts the same actors over and over again, it puts forth the possibility of having an all-star ensemble cast. Imagine a group of soldiers that includes Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, and somehow Michael Caine, too—it wouldn’t be a Nolan movie without the seasoned actor.
Bioshock
Bioshock is such a well-told video-game that it arguably doesn’t even need to be adapted, but, as there are millions of cinephiles missing out on a truly mind-blowing story because they’re not gamers, it needs a movie companion.
The game follows Jack, who stumbles upon the underwater city of Rapture after crash landing in the ocean, and, the more gamers play through the game, the more that is discovered about the city and how Jack has connections to it. It’s a haunting game, and, as Nolan has never dabbled in horror, it’d be great to see him pick up an IP that would take him out of his comfort zone.
Fallout
Being possibly the most iconic post-apocalyptic game series of recent times, there is so much lore and backstory to be careful of when adapting a franchise like Fallout. It’s almost like trying to tread through one of the minefields that can be found in the game.
However, as exposition filled as his movies are, Nolan has proved that he knows how to separate the meat from the bone and create a clear and concise sci-fi movie. There are some explosive scenes in the game, a rich futuristic world, and some time periods that expertly use the aesthetic to contrast with the post-apocalyptic future.
Splinter Cell
The Division isn’t the only Tom Clancy game that would be perfect for the director. Nolan wouldn’t make short work of many of Clancy’s novels, but Splinter Cell would be the best of them all to adapt, as the protagonist, Sam Fisher, has so much backstory to delve into. The game that would best suit Nolan is Double Agent, which has the most exciting set pieces and the most gripping narrative, as Fisher must pose as a criminal to infiltrate a terrorist group, just as the name suggests.
Metal Gear Solid
The stealth is one of the reasons Batman Begins is Nolan’s most underrated movie, as it was the first movie in which Batman acted like Batman by hiding in the shadows for as long as he needed to and using his surroundings to trick his enemies. In Metal Gear Solid, the protagonist does exactly that, and, just like the Batman series, Solid Snake has some outlandish enemies, such as The Pain, who can literally shoot bees out of his mouth.
What was so great about Batman Begins was that Nolan managed to take Scarecrow and completely ground him in reality, and that’s exactly what MGS needs, as it could end disastrously in the hands of the wrong director.
Assassin’s Creed
One of Nolan’s most common trademarks is just how big the visual scale of all of his movies are, whether it’s bomber pilots storming the beaches of Dunkirk or Batman gliding across the Gotham skyline. This is just one of the reasons why nobody can be trusted more than Nolan with the Assassin’s Creed IP.
An adaptation of the video-game was attempted once in 2016, but it was critically scathed and was branded joyless. If Nolan took the reigns, he could create some of the most stunning action sequences, all in IMAX, of course, in any kind of backdrop he desires, as the games have been based all over the world in many different time periods.
Hitman
Being another series that has already been adapted and left fans disappointed, Hitman is especially disheartening because it has been adapted twice. What’s worse is that the studio didn’t learn from its mistakes, as Hitman: Agent 47 repeated the exact same problems as 2007’s Hitman, which was that it turned the character into something he was not; an action hero.
Nolan would be great for the series because he can cast a critical eye on the series, as he has in the past, and zero-in on what works, such as the creative ways of murdering targets, and throw out what doesn’t, such as Agent 47 being a clone.