Never mind Hideo Kojima’s Mad Max game — I want George Miller’s Metal Gear

polygon.com:

According to a much-circulated red-carpet comment, Furiosa director George Miller would love his number one fan Hideo Kojima to make a Mad Max video game. “You know, I’m one of those people that I’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level,” Miller, who has an acting role in Kojima’s forthcoming Death Stranding 2, told Gaming Bible. “I’ve just been speaking to Kojima here [...] and he would take it on, but he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I wouldn’t ever ask him.” It’s a courteous professional compliment, from one auteur to another, that humbly assumes Kojima has better things to do.

My first thought was to agree. Whatever you think of Kojima and his games, he definitely has a distinctive vision, and his work carries a strong personal imprint. Making a movie adaptation seems like a waste of his talents, even for such a movie-obsessed creator. You wouldn’t expect George Miller to make a Metal Gear Solid movie, would you?

My second thought was: Damn, a George Miller Metal Gear Solid movie would be awesome.

My third thought was: Isn’t it a double standard, even a kind of snobbery, to consider Miller and Kojima above adapting each other’s work? Nobody would bat an eyelid at the prospect of a famous movie auteur (like, say, Paul Thomas Anderson) adapting a novel (like, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which Anderson is rumored to be making at the moment). An adaptation like that is seen as a conversation between two great artists, one bringing their own perspective to the other’s work. But we’ve been primed to think of movie-to-video-game crossovers (and the reverse) as mere brand extensions — because they mostly are. (Including the not-bad-not-great 2015 Mad Max game, which Miller told Gaming Bible “wasn’t as good as [he] wanted it to be,” earning an annoyed response from one of the developers.)

In his comments about Kojima, Miller dared to dream of something better. So let’s go along with that platonic ideal of adaptation