Skybound predicts video game TV and movie love-in could last for ten years

gamesindustry.biz:

The industry is enjoying a wave of acclaimed adaptations bringing hit games franchises to cinemas and televisions.

The Super Mario Bros Movie is still the third biggest animated film of all time (second before Inside Out 2 came out last month), the Fallout and Last Of Us series drew in millions of viewers, and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 is expected to continue the success of its forebears when it hits the silver screen this Christmas. The wave even continues this week with the debut of Gearbox's Borderlands movie.

David Alpert, CEO and co-founder of Walking Dead firm Skybound, is confident this is not a passing fad but the beginning of a much larger movement.

"If you look at the comic book movies, eighties and nineties adaptations were generally pretty shit – but then 2002's Spiderman kicked off a 20-year [run] of some of the most successful film and TV adaptations of all time," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I don't know that we're gonna hit 20 years for games, but I think we certainly are looking at a five to ten-year run here."

He continues: "If you look at the history of games adaptations into movies and TV, it was terrible for a long time, right? You go back to the original Street Fighter, the original Mario movie, Doom… these are not good movies and for a long time, Hollywood thought that games just weren't adaptable."

So what has changed? Alpert attributes the shift to two factors; firstly, the evolution of the video games themselves. People spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours in these immersive virtual worlds, with the Skybound CEO praising the level of character, story and depth in most modern titles.

"You look at the way that Dune was finally done... I want to see that level of awesomeness on a game movie adaptation. That's when the gold rush will come"

Secondly, he points to "a technological sea change" in film and TV production. The original Jurassic Park, he says, had around 600 special effects shots throughout its entire runtime, but now this can be found in