Dont Tell NetflixDont Tell Netflix

By George Robbins

This has certainly been an interesting year thus far, whether that be judged as a good or bad thing is within the eye of the beholder, but it is still not over just yet with much left in the limited time until it ends completely. Like any other year prior, many hoped that this year would be something different because many people were not having a great year before, but for many, this turned out to be the exact opposite of what happened. This past year has been one that many people will never really end up forgetting but for all of the wrong reasons because people will mostly just have bad memories. For the first time in the somewhat modern age we were forced to adhere to the rules put in place for a pandemic involving a novel virus previously unknown to the world. Although the virus is one that is based heavily upon an older virus, this one was much more troublesome than its predecessor which has forever changed the way things are going to be handled.

To say that things will never be the same again from this point forward is just a bit of an understatement in the long run because things won’t change all that much. While many things have inevitably changed due to the pandemic, they have only really been affected by actions that will ultimately be taken out of practice after a short amount of time has passed. Mainly, after the pandemic ends, we will be seeing many things go back to how they were before the pandemic ever really began and this is what many are hoping for. Once the pandemic began back in March, we were immediately given new rules that we had to follow for safety reasons which immediately started getting people upset. This is why many people over the past months have been doing their best to avoid actually listening to the rules they have been given.

People inherently don’t like being told what to do, but the vast majority listen anyway because it is in their best self-interest for them to listen to these rules. That aside, the most common thing for people to do nowadays is to avoid actually listening to the rules in place because they want to go out and do something other than sitting indoors for the day. Without something to keep them busy indoors, people have been losing their minds trying to figure out what it is they want to do day-in and day-out. This is why the companies that are succeeding during this period in time are the ones like entertainment companies that can function from home as opposed to being an in-person only location. This is why streaming services are pretty much exploding right now because they can broadcast whatever properties they own to the public and people will pay to watch those things.

Places like restaurants, malls, stores in general, etc.; they’re all unique locations that people love going to because they offer opportunities that people have been looking for. There are a lot of different opportunities given to people for them to be able to do something productive over these past few months, but they all have had severe limitations imposed on them by the pandemic. Many businesses immediately started shutting down after the pandemic began because they had to in order to follow the rules put in place by the government. After everything began, the pandemic forced businesses to shut down because they needed to prevent the further spread of the virus among the populace by any means necessary. The best way of doing this in the beginning of it all was to get people to simply stop going near one another until the number of new cases could be reduced to a safe point where it couldn’t rebound.

Unfortunately for just about every set of plans in place, there was no way that this was going to end up working out because from the beginning people already weren’t listening to the rules. This is how we managed to both get the numbers down and also immediately get them to jump back up again. The virus has a two week incubation period and a two week isolation/quarantine period and this means that one full month of quarantine should have been enough to week out a vast majority of the infected populace because the virus should have died out by then. Unfortunately, this did not end up being the case due to a few complications that we all did not really foresee all too well in the end due to businesses staying open. To be fair, those businesses were essential businesses which had to stay open so that people could get their essential everyday supplies in case of an emergency, but they were not regulated as well as they should have been.

From the very start, people were supposed to wear their masks and gloves as well as keep their distance from others in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading between people as time went on. On top of this, they were supposed to avoid going to places any longer than they needed to be on top of washing their hands every chance they got. This didn’t end up happening as people hoped it would and we still ended up with new cases cropping up everywhere, but the number of cases did end up going down and proper rules were able to be put into place. Unsurprisingly those rules were pretty much the same as the ones that we started off with initially with the only real difference being that people definitely had to listen to those rules from that point forward. Businesses were not allowed to open or stay open if people that frequented did not listen to those new rules that were put into place.

After a few months had passed, local governments made the “tough” decision to start reopening businesses all over the nation in an effort to get people to go back out and spend money. The economy started tanking the moment that everything started shutting down and the essential businesses being open was not enough to keep economies from failing. This is how we ended up with many businesses reopening around the same time and the number of new cases spiked almost overnight. While the amount of places which reopened varied wildly from location to location, there were many places that opened around the same time which allowed us to get a good view into just how much businesses being reopened was affecting both the economy and pandemic as a whole. Without a doubt, from that point forward, things started changing wildly which didn’t surprise anyone in the slightest.

Truth be told, once businesses as a whole were once again given the greenlight to resume business as usual, it immediately became an issue that people would start off by not listening to any of the new rules in place to prevent the spread of Covid. The rules put into place once everything started back up again were pretty much the same rules which had been put in place the moment the pandemic began. This is why a group of people within the populace immediately started complaining because they did not want to listen to these rules anymore which resulted in them not following them. This has stayed a huge point of contention among the populace since the pandemic began and it will stay that way until it ends because people don’t like the idea of having to adjust to new rules when the already established ones annoy them enough already. Businesses have been trying to make due with the fact that people are not listening to them and the rules they have in place by trying to enforce the rules to the best of their abilities.

While all businesses essentially have the same rules that must be followed, they are not all followed in the same way due to the variety of businesses out there in the world. When some businesses have people come in, those people can then sit down and relax with little regard for the rules in place, but others simply don’t allow for this sort of thing to happen. Some businesses cannot function properly unless they follow all of the rules put into place for them after the pandemic began and these businesses have been suffering. It is not the fault of the businesses or the governments at all but rather the fact that those businesses are not meant to function properly in a society where a pandemic is currently ongoing. This is just something that cannot be rectified properly because we don’t want to take the unnecessary risks involved with this action which would end up causing more harm than good.

Most businesses that reopened that suffered were ones that often involved a number of people going out to the same location where they would be within the same area for a fair amount of time together. Obviously, the industry to be affected the hardest by all of this was the film industry which immediately began suffering like other companies the moment theaters shut their doors. Like many other types of business, studios and movie theaters were forced to shut down for health and safety reasons once the pandemic began and they had no way of dealing with it. Some studios, namely Universal, had the radical idea to actually start just releasing their movies straight to digital in a bid to try and continue making money after the pandemic began and they couldn’t show their movies in theaters. This ended up, unsurprisingly, not working out with many studios who instead wanted to wait to release their films once theaters could reopen their doors.

On top of not being popular with studios, movie theaters were even more against the idea because they would just straight-up be missing out on revenue, period. This meant that the theaters would not be able to bring in customers because they would have no new movies to show and this terrified them in the end. Then, Universal made the announcement that they planned on releasing movies in theaters and on digital at the same time on their scheduled release dates and all hell broke loose as a result. Theaters like AMC started flatly refusing to show any future titles from Universal because they were going to go along with a plan like this which would obviously take away a massive amount of revenue from the industry as a whole, though mostly from theaters. What would then follow would be a couple of months of radio silence where it is safely assumed that the studio and theater companies held a meaningful discussion about how they would handle things from that point forward.

Luckily for just about everyone involved, an agreement was reached that, on its own, would easily reshape the entire industry at its fundamental levels even after the pandemic finally comes to an end. This agreement which we saw unfold was one that would allow new movies to release on digital and DVD formats long before they would normally end up releasing. Under the previous contracts that we have seen from theaters, movies would only be able to release after a couple of months had passed and theaters were essentially done with said movie. Truth be told, movie theaters thrive entirely on the fact that they get movie exclusivity which is how they make their money to begin with because then people are forced to go spend money in theaters. With movie exclusivity, movie theaters are able to open to large crowds that want to go out and see new movies that they can’t go see somewhere else.

Under the new deal made between theaters and the remainder of the industry, studios would be able to release their new films after just seventeen days in the movie theater scene. After the initial 17 days is up, studios are allowed to release their films digitally which is a massive change from how things used to be done. Obviously this is a much shorter period of time than before and would completely change the landscape of the industry as a whole long before anything else would do so. The pandemic most certainly shook some things up, but this was perhaps the biggest change to end up being made by the industry as a whole. With this ability to play their films with much shorter theatrical runs, studios could make the bulk of their theatrical run money and then start banking in on those that have been wanting the film to release before they would watch it.

With the new plans in place, the only thing that theaters and studios had to wait for at that point was an opportunity for theaters to finally reopen to the public. Unfortunately for the movie industry, there wasn’t much that they could do before the time was right as it was entirely up to the government whether theaters would be able to once again resume their business as usual. What this meant was that theaters would have to wait for a little while before they would finally be able to reopen to the public as the general consensus was that theaters were too dangerous for places to reopen too early once again. Movie theaters were given new rules to follow in or to keep people from getting infected or spreading the virus but they were unfortunately backed into a corner. Although they had the same rules in place that every other business had, the layout of the business itself was what made things so difficult in the end.

Movie theaters fundamentally function differently from other forms of business for the most part because they have large groups of people seated in them for hours at a time where people don’t really move at all. This last fact ensures that their germs and the like spread and emanate from them simply as they are sitting in their seats which further emphasizes the danger they put people in by being open. Like other major businesses that have high capacities or similar functions, they were among the last to receive the green light to resume normal operation. They didn’t really get to resume normal operation though because they had all of the new rules that they had to follow in order to properly resume operations. This meant that people had to wear masks whenever they weren’t eating or drinking and the overall number of people that could be there was severely limited as well to prevent people from overcrowding. These new rules made it difficult to continue on regardless, but what happened over the summer made it almost impossible for theaters to continue onward.

Over the summer, namely late July and early August, movie theaters were given the ability to once again open up to the public but things did not go as they anticipated in the slightest. Movie theaters were finally given the opportunity to once again allow customers the opportunity to come in once again to have the movie theater experience they always had before. Unfortunately for movie theaters, this didn’t mean anything to anyone as the vast majority of people did not care about movie theaters opening up once again because they had no new films to show to the public at large. This was not the fault of movie theaters though as studios were pretty much refusing to release any of their films until they knew for a fact that there was a market for them. If movies were given to theaters then theaters would have opened as soon as possible and if theaters opened then studios would have sent their films out to be shown ASAP.

What ended up happening was a dance where nothing ended up being accomplished in the industry because neither side would give first due to the new wave of the virus which was hitting at the time. Therefore, nothing was happening and the delay of both theatrical reopenings and movie releases were happening which caused even more trouble in the long run. Without either side acting first, we were left with nothing happening whatsoever and the movie industry stayed at a standstill until AMC basically said they had enough and decided to open up to the public once again. Around the middle of August, AMC reopened their doors to the public to once again allow movies to start showing to the public to begin the process of hopefully making money once again. Unfortunately, things did not turn out in any way how they originally wanted them to and this drove everyone to doing things no one would have ever imagined for the industry.

First of all, what is it that every single movie theater needs in order to resume functioning and to make money? The very simple answer to this is in the name and that is that they need movies in order to be a movie theater and to get people through their doors to make revenue. Before most theaters reopened, there were some that reopened with the idea to get old movies playing to try and draw people in which was able to generate some kind of revenue from the people that genuinely enjoy the movie-going experience. However, the vast majority of people did not care about this and did not want to take a major risk going out to the movies over something like this in the end. This goes back to the fact that movie theaters need new movies in order to capture the interest of those involved because they only really function based on this fact. The movie-going experience is just an ideal made up by film-makers that think that movie theaters are the only premiere way to watch their movies.

So if movie theaters did not have any new movies, then wouldn’t they immediately start losing revenue as soon as they reopened to the public? The very quick answer to this is yes and they did, in fact, stop getting enough revenue to properly continue business once again because nobody really cared about the movie-going experience as a whole. Instead, people had grown far too accustomed to the fact that they could watch any new movies they wanted from home without the need, or fear, of going out to a theater just to see a new film. This resulted in no one wanting to go out to theaters unless they had an incentive to do so and this is where movie theaters had to race against the clock over the summer to try and get new movies to show to the general public to keep them entertained. Despite a couple of films releasing the moment theaters reopened, none of them were captivating enough to get audiences involved and this is where the movie ‘Tenet‘ came into play at the end of August.

For those who are completely unaware, and most people pretty much are unaware according to the numbers, ‘Tenet’ was the newest blockbuster film from acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. Nolan has become a household name over the years and therefore, any new movie that he comes up with is known for the incredible attention to detail that it usually has within and the fact that it will blow people’s minds in some way, shape or form. Nolan is known for coming up with various plots and visuals which have stimulated peoples’ minds for years and this movie was definitely shaping up to be one that would be in that same vein. The movie was originally meant to premiere back in the middle of July, but delays with theater reopenings and the resurgence of new Covid cases resulted in the movie’s release date being pushed back until further notice. To be honest, it was just pushed back a couple of weeks at a time until such a moment where Warner Bros., the studio responsible for producing the film, would finally release it in theaters. That time would eventually come by the moment the end of August hit and the movie released in the international and domestic markets.

Interestingly enough, ‘Tenet’ was going to release the way that it normally would in the domestic market first and then the international, but the spread of the virus was worse domestically which resulted in the movie being pushed. In response, they decided that regardless of what happened, ‘Tenet’ would hit international markets first and this led to the last Friday in August being the day that the movie hit the international theatrical marketplace. The following Friday, the first one in September, saw the release of the film in the domestic marketplace and regardless of which market it was released on, the movie ended up bringing in a lot of money overall. It was nowhere near what they needed to be able to break even before including marketing costs, but given everything that had happened this year, it was most definitely a start and one that would not be forgotten considering what happened next. While the amount of money being earned dropped a lot the following week internationally, this was to be expected, but no one expected the massive decline in revenue that was seen in the domestic market.

First of all, the international market which continued playing ‘Tenet’ was actually managing to bring some money in because things were going much better in the pandemic for other countries. The domestic market was a far cry from this however because it immediately started tanking and after just a few weeks the amount of revenue being brought in nationwide ended up being just a few million dollars. While this may not sound all that bad in the long run, the truth is that this is pretty bad because this is the amount that was brought in nation wide, not just in one state or one theater. Theaters and studios usually split the profit from ticket sales 50/50 in order to keep things fair and profitable for both institutions, but this time around was different, Warner changed that amount to 60/40 because they were desperate to make as much as they could off the movie, knowing full-well that it wasn’t going to do as well because of the pandemic. They just never would have predicted that things would end up as badly as they did and that they would end up losing so much money in the end because of pure lack of ticket sales.

This failure in cinema showed every other studio that this was not the right time to release their films and as a result, most studios pushed all of their films out of this year’s line-up and into some time next year. Thus, we were left with something that we never would have really imagine before which was that most new movies would be delayed for upwards of a year or maybe even more given the precise studio. Christopher Nolan had a lot to say about this move from studios as he felt that this decision was the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation both ‘Tenet’ release. Nolan felt that studios should instead try to help fix the market in some way instead of simply trying to outlast the pandemic because it might be the only way to keep theaters from going under. Truth be told, many theaters once again closed up shop or they are going to be bankrupt by the end of the year because they have nothing that can help them make back their revenue that has been lost.

If they have no new revenue, then theaters have no true methods of staying open, so Nolan wanted studios to try and find alternatives which could help drive traffic back to theaters to fix the situation rather than trying to wait it out. One issue with theaters reopening with so few blockbusters is the fact that there is no variety and therefore no reason for some people to be incentivized to go out to movie theaters. This isn’t helped along by the fact that studios have all but removed new blockbusters from this year’s line-up and therefore there is nothing to help theaters as this year comes to an end. This is all pretty terrible for theaters in the long run, but this is far from the only thing that is currently harming them as there is even more that could threaten to ruin them as time goes on. Going back a bit though, there are some studios heeding the call who wish to help theaters in some way as long as it is also convenient to them as well.

There are some movies that have since released since ‘Tenet’ came out back in late August and while they may not have really brought any revenue into theaters, they did bring something in. Considering the fact that some kind of revenue is better than none, this is a step in the right direction, but these movies really aren’t enough to draw people in. This is why we have now reached the point where movie theaters are pretty much just desperate at this point and they are all following the same release deal that AMC initially proposed which allows movies to release after just 17 days in theaters. Therefore, it is a win-win for studios because they can make some extra cash from people wanting to see their films in theaters and they don’t have to wait too long afterward to release the films to the public on digital where they are bound to make most of their money. On top of this, studios that do this can get some good faith from theaters because, while they may not be getting their money the way they used to be, theaters are actually getting something rather than nothing.

Not everyone is trying to stay on the same playing field these days however, because as we reach the end of this year, it would appear that some, namely one, studio(s) is trying to cheat the system in some way to make their money. That studio would be Warner Bros. who are now taking the initiative to try and mess with as many people as they possibly can before the year is over it would seem. As mentioned previously, Warner Bros. were the studio responsible for putting out Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’ to theaters and therefore they took the hit for the movie’s theatrical failure. Considering the fact that this hit was one straight to the wallet, they did not take it well and thus we ended up in the situation we are currently in where they are doing something no one would have thought doable before. They are going to go with Universal’s original attack plan for releasing movies both during and after the pandemic.

Basically, this means that they plan on releasing their films on both a digital platform as well as in theaters on the same day for the remainder of this year and for all of next year. Warner themselves have had a pretty rough year this far and they don’t seem like they will be lying down any longer, but the way they are going about it just seems more like scorched earth tactics at this point. Other than the failure of the ‘Tenet’ launch in theaters, they have had a rough year in general because of the launch of their premiere streaming service HBO Max. Unlike everything that came before it, HBO Max is a service which takes pretty much all of Warner’s library and essentially puts it all into one place where people can watch whatever is in the HBO library any time they want. On top of this, they have been boasting that they are adding new movies and shows on a regular basis from all forms of content which is their way of trying to convince people to subscribe to the service as soon as possible. Unfortunately, none of these tactics worked so they went with one that always does, that would be exclusive content.

Streaming services are nothing new nowadays and new ones releasing for big companies is not really all that surprising because it is more of a rebranding tactic these days for companies to do so. This means that it is actually pretty common these days for companies to do this sort of thing because it allows them to keep up with other companies. Other studios need to stream nowadays because it is the only way possible for them to keep up with the current market where being able to release new content and people be able to watch it any time they want is considered the new norm. This is the only way for the market as a whole to keep up anymore because people have grown very much accustomed to being able to watch whatever content they want whenever they want it anymore. Warner Bros. recognized this fact after enough time had passed and they made the decision to consolidate their content across all mediums by putting all of it out on their HBO Max service where people could watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it.

Jut because they now had a premiere streaming service though, did not mean that they would have the immediate fan base that they were hoping for and they were left twiddling their thumbs after everything was said and done. They were not able to get a lot of people interested and/or subscribed to their website in the end and thus they immediately ran into trouble which they are still trying to deal with now more than ever. Streaming sites of all kinds usually run into this issue with only one recent example actually working out from the get-go and this was the Disney+ streaming service. The only reason that things ended up working out for this service was because they had a lot of good faith built up in their brand for many years prior to their launch and this helped in launch tremendously. They were actually under the impression that they would not do as well as they did when they first launched Disney+ which just goes to show how volatile that whole market really is right now.

Thus, Warner Bros. just like every other company with a streaming service, is just trying to expand their subscriber base and this is very necessary at the moment because of their overall lack of revenue they suffer from at the moment. It is due to this lack in subscribers that they are now taking measures that other people would now consider ridiculously unfair to the industry as a whole and this is because of their new plans for exclusive content. Streaming services tend to have the hardest time attracting new subs because they need to incentivize people to come to their platform and exclusive content is what allows for that incentivization to happen in the first place. So exclusive content easily becomes the best way for streaming services to draw people in which is what Warner is now hoping for going into next year. They plan on bringing in as many people as they can with their new content even if it means ruining the plans of so many others in the industry.

This wasn’t originally going to be their plan of attack though as they were just going to continue releasing their content as it was available with some unique content being spread in there in some way. One of the biggest releases they have coming up is actually the Zack Snyder Cut for ‘Justice League’ which was an announcement that many fans were waiting a long time for and when news of this broke, people immediately became excited. This, plus the fact that the movie is meant to premiere in four parts exclusively on HBO Max made it an event that people everywhere were going to have to sub for. Unfortunately, the release is in some time early-2021 and people would only really have to sub for about a month or so and then they could stop anytime they wanted which would ruin their plan to try and keep recurring subs on their site. So what could they do to continually keep people subbed to their site all-year round and maybe longer than that?

The apparent answer to that question is to release all of their new films pretty much straight to HBO Max while simultaneously releasing their new content in theaters. This means that they will be splitting their revenue streams over the course of the next year between both release methods in a bid to more so drive people to their streaming service instead of the theaters. Of course, there are many people and institutions out there that are not taking too kindly to all of this though and want Warner to back down and change their minds about everything that they plan on doing over the following year. Of course, they don’t actually plan on doing this and it is now leading to a point of no return where people are just straight up deciding not to be involved with Warner anymore. This is all dangerous to the industry as a whole and it can easily result in everything going downhill from this point forward even as things seem to be coming to a close.

What is happening with the pandemic right now is that their is a vaccine which apparently has a very real shot of working on the vast majority of the public that can stop this pandemic in its tracks. This is not a guarantee in the slightest though because they have to see what side effects are as well as whether the vaccine will actually end up working once people have actually been injected with it. So then, how will things be handled once the pandemic reaches its end? Well, we can pretty much expect most everything to start going back to how it was before the pandemic began in March and even if the pandemic doesn’t end in the next couple of months, it is likely to end within the year to some degree. So if this is the case and it is now knowledge to just about everyone, then why is Warner still going along with their new release plan. To quote a very greedy crab, “Money.”

I’m not trying to say that it is wrong for a company to try and make money, but the way they are currently going about it may not be viewed as the best way possible given how it affects their own paid actors, directors, and production crews. More specific to the actors and directors is the fact that they mainly make their money based upon how much money gets brought in by the box office. When a movie is released, we have already discussed that studios get a portion of the money from tickets sales which is how their deals with theaters work to begin with. Beyond that deal is the one that studios have with their directors and actors as well, where they make a percentage on every single ticket that gets sold as well. Even now, those types of deals are in place, even if theaters wouldn’t bring in as much as they would have pre-pandemic which is something no one is really all that surprised about.

Warner Bros. new plan would take money immediately away from directors and actors who would otherwise make most of their money from the contracts where they have to get paid based on percentage of ticket sales. In response, they immediately started complaining to the studio that they should be compensated for the sudden change in release structure, which is further cemented by the fact that the studio already made the decision to do this with their upcoming ‘Wonder-Woman 1984.’ They made a new contract deal with Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins that said that they would receive $10 million each in compensation for the move to HBO Max. It turns out that no one else from the 17 other releases Warner has coming out next year have been given a similar type of compensation thus far and this is leading to some major future changes for the studio. It turns out that chief among those new changes for the studio is the fact that many directors are discussing boycotting Warner for any future films.

Not only does Warner have this on their hands, but if they go through with this for every film in the upcoming year, then they are going to have a very hard time if the pandemic ends. Movies release in theaters before they release digitally primarily because it means that they will end up making more money in the end off of the movie. If they release movies at the same time when things go back to normal, then people will have no reason to go out to theaters which will result in a huge loss in overall revenue at the box office. It has already been projected that the total loss in funds at the box office with this move could be somewhere around $1.2 billion because Warner mainly only puts out blockbuster films. It remains to be seen how much of that can be compensated though with many people then subscribing to HBO Max to watch new films.

Beyond this though is another issue which prevented Universal from trying something similar to this earlier in the year and that is the hatred from theaters. Movie theaters rely very heavily upon the exclusivity period granted by studios for them to have movies granted to them before their official releases on digital or other formats. If movies are immediately given releases that take away from their releases on other formats then they will end up losing money for someone along the line and maybe everyone for that matter that is involved. This is the current state of the film industry at the moment and things don’t seem to be getting better any time soon, though there are some things that can take our attention away from the incredible crapshoot that is movie releases right now and that is new movies that are coming out even as we speak about everything else. While many movies had their release dates pushed back some time into next year, some of them have release dates set for this year.

Among the movies to release this year is yet another video game based movie ‘Monster Hunter‘ which was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and stars Milla Jovavich. Of all of the games for there to now exist a movie for, we have a movie based upon a complicated monster hunting video game from a director who is widely considered the worst at adapting video game movies. To be at least somewhat fair to the man, video game movies are notorious pieces of media because it is extremely difficult to encapsulate what makes a video game into a movie version of said game. Video games as a medium should remain relatively separate from the movie making sphere of influence unless people know they can make it right. There are very few video game movies which could be considered good by any stretch of the imagination with only one so far managing to beat out pretty much most other films in a given year, though this was a year where we had a pandemic.

Video games as a medium are different from most other forms of entertainment and maintain a special stance in the digital entertainment medium as a whole. No one within the digital entertainment spectrum can ever say that a video game movie could possibly beat out the game that it is emulated off of, just like there are very few cases where a movie is better than its book counterpart. The level of interactivity seen with movies is vastly different from the level of interactivity from video games because we as the players influence parts of the game itself. A movie is something which is completely on the rails for the entirety of its run time and no matter how we look at it, the way it plays out is the same every time. They have tried to combine the two mediums with choose your own adventure movies, but the results are still the same with every character essentially having the same actions and dialog no matter what happens.

In a video game, things are entirely different almost every single time because the player has control directly over the characters which allows them to play however they want. Even if it is a game where every piece of story and dialog is the same for every person, the gameplay itself where players control the characters can vary wildly in some cases. To be fair to some movies and video games, there are some things that can actually translate to the big screen, especially when you have a strong story-based game where most everything is laid out for you in the end. It is fair to say that those types of games are definitely allowed to be turned into films because they are the best designed for that sort of thing, but they need to be done well in the end otherwise it is pointless to work on them at all. When you take another game that is a lot less linear and turn that into a movie, then you have a very long and winding road ahead of you to get it to work out properly.

A series among the video game movie populace which has become known for being notorious in its own right for both following, yet ignoring the story of the original games is the Resident Evil series of games/movies. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, those movies were loosely based upon the video games of the same name, but he created entirely new characters to fit his new narrative and as a result, it did not pay off. While those movies may have been huge cash cows, they were widely regarded as horrible adaptations of the Resident Evil franchise of games. This is something that appears to be continuing even to this day as Paul W.S. Anderson has apparently made yet another big budget video game movie which has bad reviews. While it may certainly be hard to make a proper video game movie, he doesn’t even seem like he tries to do it well because the reviews for the new ‘Monster Hunter’ film.

The ‘Monster Hunter’ movie is one that is apparently filled to the brim with the action one would expect from a movie about fighting giant monsters on another world. However, it would appear that this cannot really make up for the fact that the movie lacks any kind of apparent character development which is about what most people expected at this point. We didn’t really expect all that much from this movie given the director and the source content that this movie was adapted from, but we were hopeful that we would get at least a decent video game movie adaptation. Unfortunately, the source content is just too weird to riff off of so it felt like it was set up to fail from the moment it was announced. Hopefully, whatever other movies are set for release are not going to be disappointments because at this point we really need something to distract us all from the frailty of the industry at the moment.