The thing with comic book characters is that their interpretation switches from author to author. What one person thinks can cause others define them in a certain way down the line. They bring their ideals and concepts to them.
So, what tone do I think is best for the Batman? Well, for me it’s a man that’s deeply hurt and wanting to do his best to help people. He can get angry but he’s not angry all the time. He’s done work on himself to deal with things throughout the years. He can crack jokes and smile.
The mask is off and the truth is that I think that the best tone for Batman is the one from the DCAU. From the picture above, this is his reaction to the Joker hanging from a catwalk over an inferno. The Joker is screaming for help and Bats is just casually looking down at him. Bemused above all things.
When he gets angry though, it’s chilling to see and that’s of course part of the wonder of the late and great Kevin Conroy. There’s one episode where Batman encounters this cruel man that uses children as his slaves to steal for him. When he eventually captures the man, Batman says that he took an oath to never become judge, jury and executioner but he sorely wishes that he was.
How does he handle his villains? He constantly seeks their rehabilitation and to help them. There’s an episode where the Ventriloquist gets released and tries to go straight. Batman spends a great number of nights hanging outside of his apartment to make sure that he doesn’t get dragged back into the underworld. As Bruce Wayne, he gives him a job working as a mail clerk in Wayne Enterprises.
It’s been said that if you can’t write a scene with Batman comforting a child, then you’re just writing the Punisher in a cape. And that brings us to the greatest scene with this Batman.
A dying psychic child has caused damage to a city and when she goes it becomes permanent and will essentially become a nuke affecting a huge swath of the city. Amanda Waller, who I’ll eventually give an entire post to, has a device that will kill her. Batman states that he’ll be the one to use it on her.
Ace has had encounters with him before and lets him into her hiding place. He finds her swinging on a swing set. She tells him that she read his mind and knows two things: that she will soon die and that he isn’t going to use the device on her.
She asks him to sit with her and he sits down on the swing with her and offers her his hand. She dies peacefully and the damage is reversed.
Perfection.
You have to keep the main things intact with Batman, the sorrow at the loss of his parents. The anger at the world for it but he should never be a monster. He should always be someone who is trying his best in an unstoppable war on crime.
This might be a controversial topic as video game movies are largely loathed and have only recently gotten good. Looking at you, Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, thanks for holding up the side. I don’t think those movies were a fluke but we saw how bad it could have been with the ugly sonic from the first trailers.
AHHHHH!
The reason I say it’s a tossup is because there is so much history behind Sonic and the expectations are going to be so high. But there’s the kicker. There are a lot of different video games that you could turn into movies with their much less well known plotlines and hell they aren’t even known that well in the video game world. Let’s look at the five that I think would really work.
Blast Corps
Speed was an enormous hit. A bus that can’t slow down and if it does, it’s not going to just kill the people on it but people around them. That’s a hell of a pitch and idea.
What if you changed it that it’s a nuclear missile truck that can kill thousands, millions of people if it crashes into something in the wrong place. Enter the Blast Corps, a group of pilots and drivers that have access to a bunch of vehicles such as robots, giant dump trucks, bulldozers and cars. They need to destroy everything in the truck’s path to make sure that it doesn’t detonate.
That concept also rules. It’s high octane, ready to go for a blockbuster disaster movie. Roland Emmerich would salivate over the idea of making this movie. Also, you could make so many toys if you make it PG. Kids would love a big playset with collapsible buildings.
The tone could be kind of silly(because it’s a silly concept) and you could just have so much fun with it. You could make some of the most wild and out there characters. Just let the actors go broad and get nuts.
You could start off with them using those construction vehicles and “they’re like, we’re not going to be able to break through in time” and all of a sudden the mech comes busting through is like. “Kept you waiting, hunh?”
Get on this one, Hollywood.
Also before I move on, in the past, I’ve heard so many people give Roland Emmerich flack for making big dumb popcorn movies. Okay, the man has a skill for making good looking popcorn movies.
Look at that, that could be a painting. The main has a niche and has mastered it.
Wild Guns
A forgotten SNES game that deserves some love because it’s so much fun. It’s a western where Annie has hired Clint to help her get revenge for her father’s murder. The two of them head out and start gunning down anything in their path.
“Frank, you charismatically handsome devil, that’s been done to death!”
It has. BUT HAS IT BEEN DONE WITH GIANT ROBOTS?
Fuck yeah
There are dinosaur skeletons. There are high tech trains. There’s a giant robot crab. It is insane. Once more you can do so much with this.
You could write such good banter between Annie, who Clint thinks is this like simple rich southern belle until she grabs her guns and proves herself to him. Meanwhile, he becomes much more understanding.
Just imagine the action scenes. The two of them running around a town as robots open fire on them. The fire dying down as they gun down the robots. And with robots, you can make it PG as well, once again bringing in the kids. That’s why the foot soldiers in Ninja Turtles should always be robots cos you can go nuts on them without worry.
Also in the remake they added two more characters.
Doris that cool lady in green and Bullet that little gunslinging dog on a Green Goblin glider. This is made to be a hit.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Another game with a paper thin plot and a great title. Two teens, Julia and Zeke, find themselves protecting their idiot neighbors from an onslaught of a variety of monsters. They’re oblivious and keep cheerleading and barbecuing in the midst of this apocalypse.
There are zombies, you nerds! Leave the burgers
They use weapons like squirt guns, soda cans, weed whackers and bazookas to fight off zombies, blobs, evil plant monsters, killer dolls, mummies, vampires and sea monsters. You can have so much fun with all of that.
In the game you have to collect your neighbors before you can move on. Boom, a scientist invented a teleporter and it allows them to tap their neighbors and send them off. It would have a Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle vibe.
If you kept it moving with the run and gun vibe from the game it would kill as an action comedy. Sean of the Dead proved that you can do it already.
It Takes Two
What’s this? A modern game!? This would be great to be a more adult oriented video game movie. In it, two parents who are on the verge of divorce are magically turned into their daughter’s dolls. They are trying their best to get her to notice them so that they can get turned back into humans. But eventually another character named Hakim forces them to overcome obstacles to fix things between them and show how they’ve been neglecting their daughter.
This would be a fun family film that turns into a tearjerker towards the end. It would be like Up or Inside Out. Heartbreaking and wonderful. It could lead to so many great discussions.
I saw Inside Out with some parents and they openly wept. It was the discovery that they realized that they couldn’t make their children happy all the time. This builds on that with allowing them to check in with one another to make sure that they’re doing the best for each other and their kids.
Plus, you can add so much humor to it. A nice light in the darkness.
Bubble Bobble
Bubble Bobble is about two dragons that shoot bubbles that encase robots and other monsters before turning them into food. They are ready and waiting to become mascots and big as the minions. Look at how cute he is.
Just give them cute personalities and you are ready to go. Make a land of the dragons that they have to protect and them using their bubbles to fight back.
You would need to do a little more worldbuilding on this one though. The levels for Bubble Bobble weren’t exactly detailed.
Think of it as a blank canvas
Hell, you could do a crossover movie with the Yoshis! That would be super cute.
Summary
So those are my choices for the next video game movies. There are so many games out there that I might have to do this again and still never reach the bottom of the barrel. But who cares. This was fun.
Something that has always bothered me about being a podcaster is when we cover a bad movie that doesn’t have the advantages of its big budget contemporaries. It makes me feel like I’m punching down, which doesn’t make for good comedy. Comedians should always punch up at those in power. Even someone making a piece of trash is still putting themselves out there. And if it’s good, I’ll give the piece its roses.
But then there are the works that are just so bad and are the little engine that could that decided to just slam through a town at full speed. Leaving a wake of destruction in their path.
I mainly write about the Lifetime movies that we cover. They’re clearly cheaply made and seemingly mass produced so that all of them are roughly the same except for the part where the crazed killer character decides to go nuts for some reason or another. They have their own charm to them but there’s a part of me that always wishes they were a bit better.
The problem is that I know they could be. There’s always a lesser light in the world to show that it could be done for even cheaper. That’s not an excuse for these people to pay their people less, it’s for them to try harder.
Paranormal Activity is a horror movie that was made for 15,000 dollars and grossed about 194 million in 2007. Adjusted for inflation that’s 294 million today. It was made with a few cameras on tripods, about five unknown actors and just was well made from the jump.
Godzilla Minus One was made for ten million dollars. That is a drop in the bucket for studios like Marvel and Warner Bros and yet it’s stunning and well made. Look at the below image. You can tell they cared and wanted to make the best movie that they could.
It’s because these movies understood something. That poverty isn’t the death of creativity but where it’s born. There is a long tradition of this throughout the world of media. Monty Python wanted to make a movie making fun of the middle ages and Arthurian legends but couldn’t afford horses. What would be the funniest way to handle this? Have every knight have a squire that bonks two coconuts together. Have characters comment on it to make one of the funniest exchanges in comedy history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqtS9xyl0f4&ab_channel=3qui1i6riM
Mystery Science Theater 3000(MST3K), had to constantly make a nearly two hour show on a minuscule budget. Their puppets and set were clearly made of found objects. The puppets could barely move on their own. How did they make up for all of this? With excellent writing that was clearly positioned in their own Midwest slice of life.
And that’s what it all comes down to. The money in the end doesn’t matter. Passion can make up for it. If you believe in your piece of media and you want it to be the best it can be, it will be. That’s what I’m attacking. The fact that the filmmakers don’t care. I want to love their movie but the fact that they turned in something that’s only worth a C+ at best is going to stop me from doing so and I’m not going to stop myself from calling it out.
Franklin Cota, an author and podcaster 