Guillermo del Toro hasn’t had a lot of luck with video games. In 2010, he announced he’d be the creative force behind a trilogy of games called InSane, a survival horror game that would feel like an infinite sandbox but ultimately guide the player back to its main storyline. Two years later, the game was canceled, studio THQ went bankrupt a few months later, and the IP reverted to del Toro, just in case he ever wants to use the monsters in something else entirely. Technically, if he used those story elements and made a movie instead, it wouldn’t count as a video game movie, since the game itself never existed.
As far as making a movie out of a game that does exist, there are many that might seem to be a good fit. Silent Hill, for one, has the sort of dark, rusty, creature-filled spaces that del Toro loves (and he even worked on a canceled game for), while something like Shadow of the Colossus might feed his giant monster jones. Unfortunately for fans who may fondly imagine such pairings of material and director, however, he’s going to pass. In an interview with IGN, del Toro says “never,” and even adds, “No, f**k no,” for emphasis when asked if he’ll ever try adapting a video game into a movie. It’s not that he’s opposed to them existing — the problem is that he did try, once, to make BioShock into a movie.
Opening up about the process, Guillermo del Toro revealed he took a couple of business calls — he doesn’t say with whom — which were, “probably one [sic] of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had.” These put him off the idea for good, which implies it wasn’t just an issue of one difficult company, but of complications inherent to taking that kind of source material and changing it to work as a movie story.
Del Toro is astute about the differences in medium, saying, “I find that the dynamics of a video game are very different than a movie. They may be cinematically similar in terms of the camera moving and this and that, but the storytelling is very different, because you’re not solving puzzles. You’re not assembling. When we made the structure for InSane, we created what I call a mandala. You have to give the illusion of an infinite sandbox and you lead audiences to the right or to the left through their ‘own decisions,’ but you sort of have to corner them.” Adapting the latter into the former seems to have been the big point of contention.
Gore Verbinski was also attached to direct BioShock at one point, but his deal-breaker was simpler — he couldn’t get the budget he needed while still keeping it R-rated, as he thought it needed to be. Netflix has been working on an adaptation for at least four years now, with Francis Lawrence set to direct, but no start of production in sight, and at least one budget reduction already made. As for trying to make another video game, Del Toro said that after the InSane experience, his answer is “never again.” It’s an old trope to never say never in this business, so when an Oscar winner does it twice in a row, he means it. It also jells with previous comments that eventually, he only wants to do animation.
Are you disappointed by the news? Is there a video game Guillermo del Toro should reconsider? Let’s discuss below.
