USA Today looks at 300 and wonders if it is spearheading a revival … of video game movies?
300 director Zach Snyder used such video game elements as ratcheting levels of foes and action and stylized special effects. Will his movie’s success — a stunning $162 million in only three weeks, with no major star and a cost of $60 million — spawn copycats?
“Movies like 300 have kind of blurred the lines between this business and video games and comics,” says Chris McGurk, the former MGM vice chair who is launching his own company, Overture Films.
Borys Kit, senior film editor with The Hollywood Reporter, cautions against categorizing 300 as just a video game movie. “The way (Snyder) made 300 — with three cameras for those action scenes, zoom in, zoom out, and three different speeds — that is like a video game because there is that function where you can change your perspective,” he says. But “that’s also the way panels work in comic books.”
The article mentions other films with a “video game feel” to them, like Crank, and lists several video game movies that are or were in the works, including Metal Gear Solid, Gears of War and Peter Jackson’s now-halted Halo film.
