Uncharted Is Unfilmable as a Movie

While speaking to Zap2It.com, director Seth Gordon revealed that he plans to begin production for the movie Uncharted early next year. The film has been in varying stage of development since 2010. I believe Gordon’s intentions toward the franchise are noble. Gordon is a talented filmmaker. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was a fun, brilliant, little documentary. Since that time, he has made some solid comedies, including Four Christmases, Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief. However, while Gordon’s intentions are good, a property such as Uncharted is simply unfilmable.

To date no director has really been able to crack the code for turning a popular video game franchise into an excellent cinematic masterpiece. Sure,there have been some decent attempts but nothing to really write home about. In addition, other than Tomb Raider, no video game-based movie has really been able to make over $100 million at the US domestic box office. While I do believe Gordon is talented, I do not think he is the filmmaker to crack the code for turning successful video games into watchable, successful Hollywood tentpole event films.

Gordon is not even the first director to be attached to this project. Neil Burger (The Illusionist, Limitless) and David O. Russell (The Fighter, American Hustle) were attached to the project first. Both are talented filmmakers in their own right. Russell is arguably a much more seasoned, accomplished and successful director than Gordon. However, based on the ideas Russell voiced for the Uncharted franchise, he was a terrible fit for the material and the property. 

I can easily understand the attraction of wanting to make a movie out of the Uncharted series. The narrative and presentation of the games are incredibly cinematic. The games are like playing through an epic, Indiana Jones-like adventure. The games seamlessly meld cinematic events into the actual gameplay with an expertise that is rarely seen in video games. However, those same elements exemplify why this property cannot be adapted or boiled down into a two-hour film. 

With Uncharted, much of the appeal from the game is derived from how the experience makes a player feel like the writer of his or her own adventure movie. The controls and style allow gamers to enable the characters in their own Indiana Jones experiences and advance through on a personal level. A movie cannot really capture that uniquel visceral experience, nor can it create the connection you feel toward the great cast of characters. 

Some fans would probably argue to look at comic book superhero movies. Now, those films tend to happen in great supply. Before the 2000s and the advent of such films as X-Men and Spider-Man, comic book movies tended to be a bad joke in Hollywood. Many were B-movies or incredible disappointments, aside from Tim Burton’s Batman or Richard Donner’s Superman, which were films that seemed to happen only once every 10 years. Obviously, now things have changed. Superhero movies have become the new, major event films of the year. Many of them are quite good. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still my favorite movie of the year, and to date it is still the highest grossing movie in North America for 2014.

That said, comic books and video games are still too radically different works. Many comic books, especially in this digital age, have the ability to be captured more easily on film. Comic books are already a lot like storyboards or framed shots for a film. The stories are essentially modern mythology and morality tales that can sometimes be aptly woven into a cinematic narrative. However, I would still argue there are some comic book stories that cannot be adapted for film. While I would say Watchmen was a strong attempt, the overall execution of the film was a failure. In my humble opinion, the film failed to really capture the essence and intricacies of what made the original comic so intriguing and special. It also compromised the integrity of the material in far too many ways to make the presentation more acceptable to an audience. In the end, the big-budgeted film only managed a disappointing $185 million worldwide.

With the Uncharted franchise, I will believe a movie gets made when I see it. At the end of the day, developing a property like this probably comes out in the range of low seven figures in terms of cost. A movie like this would probably cost somewhere in the amount of $200 million for Sony Pictures when thinking in terms of budget and also prints and advertising. I do not believe Sony will be eager to greenlight a video game property when so few have managed to truly break even.