The art of making movies out of video games has a long and bad history, but things have been on an upswing lately. A few good examples have softened the memories of the bad ones, but that doesn't suddenly mean that every game that sells a few million copies can make the leap to the big screen.
The opening salvo of good video game movies came in 2019 with Detective Pikachu and was followed swiftly by the incredible double act of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Those films sold well, earned positive reception from fans and critics, and vastly changed the cultural perception of video game movies for modern audiences.
Several big video game studios are making their intentions to move their efforts into the cinematic space clear. Nintendo now has an internal film studio. Sega has named several big and small properties of theirs that will be following The Blue Blur's lead. Thanks to the financial success of the recent Uncharted film adaptation, Sony is excitedly joining the club. Several substantial recent Playstation releases are set to come to the multiplex or the small screen within the next year or two. The twin stars of this business plan are Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us. The former has a film adaptation in the works courtesy of John Wick director Chad Stahelski, while the latter is heading to HBO Max with Pedro Pascal in the lead role. Both are very cinematic gaming experiences with a lot of notes taken from existing popular film and TV projects. They're also working on a couple of less inspiring ideas.
Days Gone was released in 2019, developed by Bend Studio, and it landed within the top 20 best-selling games of that year. It's an open-world third-person shooter that puts the player in the role of outlaw biker Deacon St. John. St. John wanders the post-apocalyptic wasteland of rural Oregon after a generic zombie plague and its generic after-effects. It sold well, over 8 million copies by some estimates, but it didn't have the level of positivity one might expect from critics or audiences. The game was decried for its poor story, boring missions, formulaic plot, and the overwhelming lack of personality in its protagonist. It's perhaps the least-loved Sony first-party title of its generation, forgotten as quickly as it came out. Sony even shut down the potential sequel. Despite that explicit show that Sony does not have faith in the IP, a feature film adaptation is on the way.
Days Gone was explicitly inspired by plenty of existing media, mostly zombie movies and TV shows. The pieces name-checked by Bend were World War Z, The Walking Dead, and Sons of Anarchy. Those three works brewed into a boring overlong malaise would be a perfect description of Days Gone. All three began in the late 2000s or the early 2010s. The zombie craze was dead long before the release of the game in 2019. Every medium had said all it needed to say about the breakdown of society in the aftermath of the dead rising from their graves. At this point, it borders on a callback. Aside from The Walking Dead, which goes on without any spark of life just like the monsters of its title, zombie media is mostly abandoned. Days Gone would be dropping a minimum of a decade after the fad died out. On top of the fact that it represents a trend that's well past its expiry date, the specific work that the film seeks to adapt is poisonous.
One of the big problems with making video game movies in the first place is that removing gameplay from games leaves behind an often lackluster product. Games already have stories, cutscenes strung together are basically just badly paced movies, and the only thing that often saves them is the experience of playing. The most frequently praised element of Days Gone was its enemy AI. Large armies of the undead were able to appear on-screen simultaneously and pursue the player to the death. That feeling of tension can't be recaptured in a film, and the closest thing has already been captured by other stories. The most frequently panned aspects of the game were its story and characters, which is all the film could faithfully recreate.
People don't want another boring zombie movie. They certainly don't want one led by a character that gamers despised and forgot. Sony doesn't think the adventures of St. John were worth a revisit in the medium that birthed him, do they really think that it's a better proposition on the big screen? Days Gone got the subpar reception it deserved, but adapting it to a film would only amplify the worst parts while excising the only redeeming qualities. If Days Gone does make it through the process and end up a major motion picture, it should serve as a valuable lesson that Sony refuses to learn. Just because it's a name people remember, doesn't mean it has a place in blockbuster cinema.