1 week Ago
Mass Effect News that Amazon MGM Studios is developing an original Mass Effect live-action adaptation of the popular video game RPG franchise should be exciting, but I can’t help but feel nervous. While I love the Mass Effect games, I have concerns about how Hollywood has handled the adaptations of our most beloved video games in the past few years. It used to be that video game adaptations were just lousy movies, half-baked attempts at capturing the magic of the game with little care for the source material.
But as we’ve entered the modern era, things have gotten a bit more unreliable. Some video game adaptations are fantastic. Others, not so much.
There’s a tension between this “golden era of TV” and some unfortunate writing trends geared at targeting the mythical “modern audience” that means you never really know what to expect anymore. The Last Of Us on HBO followed the game almost too closely but was still a very solid adaptation, while Fallout on Amazon Prime Video took more liberties with the source material but ended up being a genuine masterpiece in its own right. Shows like Arcane simply use the video game world and some of the heroes from League Of Legends , while crafting entirely new—and genuinely brilliant—stories.
Then we have Halo, a Paramount-produced series based on the popular Xbox games that failed in almost every imaginable way. Elsewhere, adaptations of popular literature have failed thanks to bizarre disregard for the original source material, from The Witcher to The Rings Of Power and The Wheel Of Time, all of which prioritize the wrong things while failing to produce great scripts (though I genuinely liked the first season of The Witcher; afterwards it spiraled downhill). Mass Effect Bitcoin Crosses $82,000 For The First Time—Boosted By Trump’s Win Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Monday, November 11 Trump Says Former ICE Head Tom Homan Will Serve As His ‘Border Czar’—Here’s What He’s Said About Mass Deportations The Mass Effect series could go any direction, and it’s impossible to say if we’ll get another Fallout from Amazon, or another Wheel Of Time.
The show is being written By Daniel Casey who is also set to executive produce. Karim Zreik will also be an executive producer along with Ari Arad and Michael Gamble of BioWare. That last name gives me some comfort, though as many fans of BioWare’s older games will tell you, the studio hasn’t really been the same in many, many long years.
Casey I’m not quite so sure about. His credits include F9: The Fast Saga, though he also did rewrites on 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was fantastic. Zreik produced shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
Arad worked on the film adaptations of Borderlands, Ghost in the Shell and Uncharted. Whether the series will follow the games closely or tread new ground with new characters remains to be seen. There is no release date at this time.
My hope is that the show’s creators will do three things: We shall see. It’s a coin toss these days whether a video game adaptation will be any good. It’s a coin toss whether anything related to BioWare is any good these days also.
I genuinely would love to watch a live-action Mass Effect show that was on par with the first two games, but I’ll remain dubious until we know more. Hope is the worst kind of poison. What do you think, dearest readers? Let me know on Twitter , Instagram or Facebook .
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