Gaming also attracts people in front of the TV

Uwe Boll enjoys what one might call cult status. Since his film debut 34 years ago, he has made nearly 50 films. While experts would preface most of them with a derogatory "mach," millions of fans around the world consider his B-movies, from "Bloodrayne" to "Far Cry" to "Zombie Massacre," to be masterpieces of trashy madness. If only because they all have something in common: they're based on video games. And not just these three.

Since adapting the Sega game "House of the Dead" for the big screen in 2003, Boll has turned around a dozen games into films. While each of them has cemented his reputation as the worst director since horror dilettante Ed Wood, the workaholic from Wermelskirchen can still call himself a trendsetter. What he started with more than 20 years ago has long since become a global standard.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when life retreated to the living room, streaming services in particular have been flooded with video game versions. Netflix has released animated or embodied versions of "Arcane" and "The Witcher," "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners," and "Castlevenia: Nocturne" online in loose succession. Paramount+ has expanded the Xbox dystopia "Halo" into a sci-fi series, and Peacock has aired the quirky Sony thriller "Twisted Metal." But none of this compares to the global click billionaire: "The Last of Us."

When HBO brought the mushroom apocalypse from PlayStation to pay TV in early 2023 for a reported ten million dollars per episode, and from there to Sky, only the series finale of "Game of Thrones" was more successful. Since then, at the latest, emphasizes Pierre Puget, CEO of Berlin-based BRAINS Narrative Studios, "game producers have to automatically consider film exploitation during development, and vice versa." The magic word, both in business and sociocultural terms, is "multichanneling."

Just as George Lucas inflated merchandising to organically cross-finance his "Star Wars" in the late 1970s, role-playing games with a post-apocalyptic theme are now geared so early toward secondary release that they resemble primary release. From the PC bestseller "Fallout" by California's Black Isle Studios to the eponymous Prime series from 2024, nearly three decades of joysticks and keyboards had to be transported to the post-apocalyptic land.

When gamer dreams inspire binge-watching in the future, television spin-offs are often already priced in during programming. First, however, cash-rich studios are still working on their existing portfolio. Netflix alone has half a dozen film and series adaptations in the pipeline, including "Gears of War" and "Horizon Zero Dawn," "Assassin's Creed," and "Clash of Clans." Ultimately, their development is incredibly efficient from a business perspective thanks to existing material and characters. More important, however, is their target audience.

Last year, nearly three and a half billion people who regularly play games generated $187 billion in revenue for the industry—six times the amount of all the movie theaters on earth. With growth rates of five percent, the rivals in the streaming wars would be ill-advised to let this potential go to waste. Because no matter how critical gamers may be of film adaptations of their beloved games, even before they go online, community-driven marketing on TikTok, Discord, and Reddit acts as seed funding for viral PR, which literally blows away even the advertising budgets of global entertainers like Amazon.

However, it's by no means purely economic factors that make games attractive for streaming and television. Their quality grows in tandem with their distribution, and by leaps and bounds. "Hardly any fiction today can compete with the storytelling, creativity, and reach of successful games," says Pierre Puget, drawing on his expertise in both spheres. However, it's "not about competition, but about the best story." Which brings us to "Directive 8020."

When Supermassive Games releases the survival thriller from the "Dark Pictures Anthology" for PS5 and PC next fall, it will be almost indistinguishable from a parallel animated series—the characters and scenery, motion capture, and cinematics are so lifelike. What a contrast to the early days of the platform transition. When the Nintendo legend "Super Mario" was made into a film in 1993, starring Bob Hoskins as a plumber and featuring music by Roxette, for a then-princely $50 million, the response was devastating, especially among console fans.

Even brawls like Jean-Claude van Damme's "Street Fighter" soon became more unintentionally comical than compelling in their content. With Bernd Eichinger's zombie massacre "Resident Evil" and Angelina Jolie as "Lara Croft," live-action games became more acceptable at the beginning of the 21st century, but hardly better. Uwe Boll had apparently lost his monopoly on embarrassing game adaptations – format changes from the jump-and-run goblin "Sonic" to the unfilmable "Tetris" were far too transparently aimed at cheap PR.

The game "Call of Duty," shown in this screenshot, is said to have cost around $700 million.

Source: dpa

That only changed with the rise of interactive originals. In the AAA segment of sophisticated multiplayer worlds, up to 200 experts develop games like "Call of Duty," which have cost a reported $700 million. "Grand Theft Auto VI" is said to have even broken the billion-dollar mark—more than the record-holders on screen ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and television ("Rings of Power") combined. The fact that neither has yet been adapted into a film despite intensive efforts speaks to the market power of the games industry.

Unlike film adaptations of literary works or the growing number of adaptations of popular graphic novels, video games ultimately have "various copyrights and licenses," as media lawyer Renate Schmidt explained at the industry gathering "Seriencamp" in Cologne at the beginning of June. Spin-offs require not only legal reviews and sound contract negotiations, but also "transmedia strategies" to justify the gigantic investments of all parties involved. And there can sometimes be quite a lot of them.

With "Secret Level," Prime Video offers an anthology series that revives a whopping 15 games, including classics like "Pac Man" and "Dungeons & Dragons." Shortly after the first season launched in mid-December, Amazon announced the second – just before Pedro Pascal began the second round of "The Last of Us." "Fallout" will also be continued soon. Of course. Gaming is popular. Not just interactively on the computer, but passively in front of the TV. But for Uwe Boll, all of this is becoming unaffordable. A real shame.