The Witcher Netflix series from 2019 was one of the better pieces of game-related media to ever release. It got favorable reviews from fans and critics and introduced thousands of people to the live-action world of The Witcher, whether they played video games or not. How did it do this? Netflix's The Witcher had the advantage of being in a format that older games couldn't get involved in.
It's an understatement to say that video game movies have had a subpar track record. Though there have been some shining gems, most video game movies have fallen flat and left a lot of fans disappointed and wishing there was a better way to show off their favorite characters outside of the game itself.
The independently made, high-budget television series is a relatively new format, and it's the perfect way to bring story-driven video games into different forms of media. Movies could never quite do justice to many players' favorite video games, no matter how good the story of the original game was. Why?
Why The Witcher Would Have Been a Bad Movie
Movies and video games are often compared when it comes to digital art, but the two don't work that well together for two main reasons: gameplay and length. Gameplay is something unique to video games and would be almost impossible to recreate within a movie or television show. Many games will never feel the same on the big screen because the story doesn't work without the gameplay to space it out, or because too much of the story is tied into the direct, immersive act of playing the game. No matter how good the Mortal Kombat movie is, it can't replicate the feeling of executing a fatality.
The second issue with movies, length, is something that The Witcher Netflix series has partially solved by offering more time for The Witcher to breathe. Story-driven video games are often very long experiences, and most of them also have huge amounts of content that cannot be cut while still maintaining the story's integrity. Simply put, the direct story of The Witcher can take dozens of hours to complete without engaging in too many side quests, and a story of that size is impossible to fit into a two-hour movie. An average movie script is around 110 pages long, and another RPG, Mass Effect 3, had a script with over 40,000 lines of dialogue. Assuming The Witcher 3 had even half that much, it would need multiple movies to cover all the important parts.
On top of the raw amount of material contained within a video game story, there are other considerations that make cutting down a game's story to movie-length difficult. Video games like The Witcher 3 don't just have one story, they have multiple stories that follow and occur within an overarching narrative. This means that fans have different favorite stories within the narrative of The Witcher 3. Serialized television gives writers and directors time to tackle multiple storylines, something that movies can't spend too much time on. TV series are structured much closer to video games, which means they are a much better medium for showing off the fantastic stories found in games.
There are more video game movies releasing in the coming years, with some, like Mortal Kombat, coming sooner rather than later. Many players are likely extremely excited to see their favorite franchises on the silver screen, but for large story-driven narratives like Dragon Age, The Last of Us, or Mass Effect, series like The Witcher's Netflix adaptation are a much better medium for sharing their stories.