Final Fantasy…
Just thought I’d add something else.
FF fell foul of a long stream of movies that came over from either comic book adaptations and videogames and bombed.
Streetfighter, MK2 and FF just have sucked, in FF’s case ir does seem that the FF Squaresoft team made the fatal error of believing that what works in their game will work on film, it doesn’t because the cutscenes are mixed in to blend with the game, so in the game the cutscenes are just pointers to the direction the game goes.
Squaresoft did not anticipate that there are other people who went to see the movie who are not die hard fans of FF, and FF seemed just to want to appease those die hard fans.
I wouldn’t say that it was intentional for it to be bad, just that they made the wrong choice, they tried to port a game over to a movie literally, giving no real thought as to what is required for a movie, in essence they still thought they were making a game.
They should have let the professional movie makers do the job, case in point, Avi Arad’s involvement with Mutant X, the people at Squaresoft are relative novices in this arena and tried something that will never work.
Take Tomb Raider, it wasn’t left to Eidos to do it, they made sure they got the best to do the job, if not we would have ended up with Lara just jumping around a lot and beating up bad guy’s, fun for a while, but without a good story and dialogue it also wouls’ve bombed.
Same for Resident Evil, I think they learned from FF and took the example of Tomb Raider in it’s plot, the game makers allowed for the film makers to have creative licence in the films, so essentially mixing the characters of the game into a story that has nothing much to do with the games.
There is too much of a big divide in games and film in that the two are not interchangeable, you will always lose something when taking a game to film and vica versa. The FF team did not take that into account and attempted the impossible scenario, by essentially taking a game’s impressive cut scene ideals to put on the silver screen.
Squishy